FirstMark and Chemistry Back $15M Seed for Liquid Compute
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Liquid Compute has raised $15 million in Seed funding to build a marketplace and financial infrastructure platform for buying, selling, pricing, and managing AI computing capacity. FirstMark and Chemistry co-led the round, with K8 Capital, Night Capital, TrueBridge, Brainchild Holdings, UFO Holdings, and investor Dmitry Balyasny participating.
The New York City company, formerly known as Pluto, is building what it calls a physical grid for compute, with a planned regulated financial market on top where companies and investors could trade contracts tied to the price of AI infrastructure.
Ronit Jain and Aarav Patel founded the company after meeting as engineering students at the University of California, Berkeley. Liquid Compute went through Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 program.
The premise is that computing capacity behaves less like oil and more like electricity. AI compute is not fully interchangeable: different GPU configurations, data center locations, power environments, network connections, and deployment schedules can make one unit of capacity substantially different from another. It is also time-sensitive, since unused GPU capacity in a given period cannot be stored and sold later the way a physical commodity can.
So the marketplace is designed to match supply and demand across hardware, geography, infrastructure, and time. The goal is to connect fragmented pools of capacity into a more transparent market where AI companies, enterprises, and other buyers can find infrastructure while suppliers monetize what would otherwise sit idle.
The financing will fund the buildout of matching and clearing infrastructure and expand the amount of compute available through the network. The company is also developing pricing and market data around its physical order book, which could give buyers, sellers, traders, and lenders a clearer view of how capacity is priced and how AI infrastructure gets financed.
Both sides of this market face real uncertainty. Model developers and enterprises struggle to forecast future compute requirements and prices. GPU providers have to decide how much capacity to build, where to put it, and how to monetize periods of underutilization.
Above the physical marketplace sits a capital markets layer. Liquid Compute has applications pending with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission for Designated Contract Market and Derivatives Clearing Organization status. Approval has not been granted. If it comes, the company plans cash-settled products linked to pricing generated across its physical market, which would let companies dependent on GPU infrastructure hedge future computing costs, let providers manage revenue exposure, and let financial participants trade contracts tied to compute prices.
Trading and data licensing partnerships are already in place with Susquehanna Predictions, BGC Group, and Wintermute. BGC is working with the company as it develops an over-the-counter market for compute. Liquid Compute is hiring across compliance and market operations to support the CFTC applications.
The investors each see a different angle. FirstMark points to compute becoming strategic infrastructure for the US economy, where transparent pricing and allocation matter to governments as well as technology companies. Chemistry backs the decision to structure compute like a power market rather than a fungible commodity market, since electricity markets already balance location-specific and time-sensitive supply and demand.
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