Ornn, a startup trying to package computing power as a tradable commodity, said Wednesday it raised $33 million in a round led by the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), as investors race to build the financial plumbing around what is essentially the AI industry's raw material.
The deal follows a $5.7 million seed the company closed last fall.
The pitch from a16z partners Ali Yahya and Liz Harkavy is that computing power has quietly become one of the world's most important commodities, but there are not robust financial markets around it.
Prices for the computing capacity are opaque, negotiated deal by deal, they wrote in a post announcing the round. Operators raising money to build data centers can't easily hedge the revenue they're underwriting, and investors who want exposure to AI infrastructure have few clean ways to get it.
Oil, real estate and energy all developed benchmarks, forward curves and instruments to price and trade risk. Compute has almost none of that – a multi-trillion-dollar asset class still financed, in the partners' words, "through private spreadsheets and handshakes."
Ornn's first product is the Ornn Compute Price Index, an institutional benchmark for GPU compute built from cleared trades rather than scraped list prices, spanning hardware types, regions and contract lengths. It's already live on the Bloomberg Terminal. The company has since added the Ornn Token Price Indices, which track the realized cost of inference tokens from the leading model providers.
Compute futures
On top of that data layer, Ornn says it's building the rest of the commodity-market stack: futures contracts and trading so operators can hedge forward pricing and steady their rental income, residual-value protection to replace straight-line depreciation on GPUs, and capital-markets products that hand investors a slice of data center revenue without owning the hardware.
Ornn co-founders Kush Bavaria and Wayne Nelms met at MIT and bring a mix of capital markets, quant trading and systems engineering. Their bet, echoed in a launch video stacked with finance voices comparing compute to oil and gold, is that compute is becoming the currency of the future and the markets around it can't keep pace.
"Ornn is building the infrastructure that allows compute markets to work, regardless of where prices ultimately go," Yahya and Harkavy wrote.
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