We are in the middle of what may be the largest capital formation event of our lifetime. The buildout of GPUs, data centers, and power will soon likely rank among the largest industrial mobilizations ever undertaken, with trillions of dollars expected to pour into AI infrastructure over the coming decade.
At the center is compute, which has quickly become one of the most important commodities in the world. Yet the market around it remains shockingly immature.
Every other capital-intensive commodity — oil, real estate, energy — has developed the tools needed to price, hedge, finance, and trade risk. These markets have trusted price benchmarks, forward curves to plan and hedge against, frameworks for underwriting asset prices down the road, and instruments that turn future cash flows into investable assets.
Compute has almost none of this. Prices are opaque and negotiated deal by deal. Operators raising capital to build new capacity can’t easily hedge the revenue projections they’re underwriting against. Investors who want exposure to the growth of AI infrastructure have few direct ways to get it. The result is a multi-trillion dollar asset class financed largely through private spreadsheets and handshakes. Ornn is building the financial infrastructure that addresses this.
That’s why we’re so excited to lead their $33 million seed round as they help transform compute from a collection of backroom deals into a functioning marketplace.
Every market starts with a price. Ornn’s first contribution here is the Ornn Compute Price Index (OCPI), an institutional-grade benchmark for GPU compute built from cleared trades rather than scraped list prices, and spanning hardware types, regions, and contract durations. The market has already started to adopt the index as a trusted benchmark. OCPI is live on the Bloomberg Terminal, and already being used by some of the most trusted names in finance.
The team has since extended the same idea to AI itself with the Ornn Token Price Indices (OTPI): benchmarks for the realized cost of inference tokens from the leading model providers.
On top of that data layer, Ornn is building the rest of the commodity market stack that compute has long lacked.
- Futures let operators and enterprises hedge forward pricing and convert uncertain rental income into more predictable cash flows.
- Residual value protection replaces crude straight-line depreciation schedules with market-based estimates of what GPUs will be worth years out.
- Capital markets products broaden access to investors, giving them exposure to data center revenues without requiring them to own or operate the underlying infrastructure.
Ornn is building the infrastructure that allows compute markets to work, regardless of where prices ultimately go.
Kush Bavaria and Wayne Nelms met at MIT and together bring an unusual fluency across capital markets, quantitative trading, and technical systems. Their core idea is simple: compute is becoming one of the most important commodities in the world, but the markets around it are failing to keep pace.
Ornn is building a modern marketplace that delivers clear price signals, the tools to hedge, and the capital rails to make AI infrastructure as financeable as oil or real estate.
We’re excited to back Kush, Wayne, and the entire Ornn team as they build the financial future of compute, one of the world’s most important commodities.
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