Ornn raises $33M to help companies buy and sell AI compute as a commodity like oil
Artificial intelligence startup Ornn AI Inc. made a big splash today as it raised $33 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto-focused fund a16z and others to build out a marketplace for computing power.
The round was co-led by Galaxy Ventures and saw participation from Nordstar and SV Angel, plus existing investors Crucible Capital, Vine Ventures, Link Ventures and Box Group.
Ornn was founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduates Kush Bavaria and Wayne Nelms, who published a blog post on X explaining that they’re building the world’s first compute marketplace. The company first developed an index that tracks the cost of graphics processing units, which are one of the most vital resources for AI applications. The goal is to bring more transparency to a compute market that’s plagued by supply limitations and unpredictable prices.
“Right now, companies that need compute are shut out, overpaying or locked into opaque contracts they cannot benchmark or exit,” the founders said. The data center operators that sell compute resources are also disadvantaged by the lack of a proper marketplace. “Operators are forced to underwrite tenants one at a time, even as usage shifts across clusters, regions and hardware types,” Bavaria and Nelms explained.
