Ornn Raises $33M Seed to Build a Trading Market for AI Compute

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Ornn, a New York based company, has raised $33 million in a Seed round led by a16z crypto. The startup is building a marketplace where the computing power that drives AI can be bought and sold like a commodity.

Alongside a16z crypto, the round drew participation from Galaxy Ventures, Nordstar, and SV Angel, with additional support from Vine Ventures, Crucible Capital, Link Ventures, and Box Group.

Founded in 2025 by chief executive Kush Bavaria and chief technology officer Wayne Nelms, both MIT graduates, Ornn is building financial infrastructure for compute. That means price benchmarks, hedging tools, and capital markets products that let GPUs be priced, traded, and financed much like traditional commodities such as oil.

The company has launched Ornn Compute, which aggregates dedicated GPU capacity across cloud platforms and includes a secondary marketplace for transferring capacity and subleasing it on demand.

The raise reflects a growing idea in the AI economy, that compute is becoming a tradable asset class of its own, with investors backing the financial plumbing to support it.