Ornn raises $33M seed from a16z crypto and Galaxy to build OCPI-settled AI compute marketplace

Ornn AI Inc. has raised $33 million in seed funding to build a marketplace for AI compute, with the round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto-focused fund and Galaxy Ventures. The raise also saw participation from Nordstar and SV Angel, plus existing backers Crucible Capital, Vine Ventures, Link Ventures and Box Group. Founded by MIT graduates Kush Bavaria and Wayne Nelms, Ornn is rolling out an index-driven marketplace that aims to standardize pricing and liquidity for GPU capacity.

The founders first developed the Ornn Compute Price Index, or OCPI, which tracks and benchmarks the transaction-based cost of GPUs, one of the key inputs for AI workloads. They argue that today’s compute market is constrained by opaque bilateral deals and volatile pricing. “Right now, companies that need compute are shut out, overpaying or locked into opaque contracts they cannot benchmark or exit,” wrote Bavaria and Nelms, adding that operators are also disadvantaged because “operators are forced to underwrite tenants one at a time, even as usage shifts across clusters, regions and hardware types.”

According to a16z crypto, most compute contracts are currently negotiated one-off between buyers and sellers, leading to wide pricing dispersion and making it hard for data center operators to forecast revenue or manage risk on new capacity. Ornn’s goal is to bring a commodity-style structure to this market. The founders note that the oil market took nearly a century to reach consistent pricing and transparent supply, but compute markets do not have that luxury. “The AI buildout is shaping up to be the largest reallocation of capital toward physical infrastructure in our lifetimes,” they wrote. “And it is being financed without the price layer, the hedging tools or the capital base that every prior infrastructure buildout required to scale.”

OCPI is designed as a settlement-grade benchmark that can underlie futures and options contracts, giving the market a single, trusted reference price for compute. “Risk transfer is facilitated through partners like ICE, which clears futures and options contracts that reference OCPI directly,” Bavaria and Nelms said. In May, Intercontinental Exchange Inc., the operator of the New York Stock Exchange, said it plans to use Ornn’s pricing index for compute futures contracts, subject to regulatory approval, providing an institutional venue for hedging GPU exposure and lending further legitimacy to the index.

On top of OCPI, Ornn has built Ornn Compute, a marketplace that aggregates GPU capacity from public clouds and neoclouds into one platform with a standardized onboarding flow. The platform supports a secondary market for transfers and on-demand sublets, with the aim of turning dedicated GPU capacity into a more liquid asset. “Operators receive diversified demand from a basket of tenants under one offtake contract rather than underwriting tenants one at a time,” the founders explained, while buyers gain detailed visibility into site, hardware configuration and terms for each reserved cluster. The new capital will be used to hire and expand the marketplace, positioning Ornn at the intersection of AI infrastructure, commodities-style pricing and derivatives markets as institutional tools for compute hedging begin to emerge.