Hyperbolic Labs Inc., creator of an open access compute cloud for artificial intelligence workloads and inference services, said it’s launching its GPU marketplace today after closing on a $12 million strategic funding round.

Variant and Polychain Capital led the round, and Chapter One, Lightspeed Faction, IOSG, Vertex, GSR, Wintermute Ventures, Blockchain Builders Fund, Alumni Ventures and Ambush also participated in today’s investment. It brings the startup’s total amount raised to $20 million following its earlier seed and pre-seed funding rounds.

Hyperbolic is building an “AI rainforest” that’s aimed at providing AI builders with all of the essential resources they need to innovate, collaborate and bring their intelligent applications and systems to life. The startup explains that rainforests in nature are dynamic ecosystems that sustain biodiversity through intricate networks of interdependence, and its AI Rainforest essentially tries to mirror this, providing companies with access to an interconnected ecosystem of compute, AI services and governance to create a fertile ground for innovation.

Its compute services can be accessed via the newly launched GPU Marketplace, which provides on-demand access to various types of graphics processing units and other AI accelerators at more affordable prices than traditional cloud computing infrastructure services.

Like several other startups before it, Hyperbolic has hit on the idea of sourcing its compute services from the thousands of GPUs that sit idly within corporate data centers and people’s laptops. The company points out that while GPUs are hard to come by for most AI developers, there are actually thousands of these chips available at any moment, unused by their owners. Its cloud-based GPU Marketplace pools these idle resources and makes them accessible to developers who can see their location and specifications and select the most appropriate ones for their AI workloads.

The startup said its GPU Marketplace was initially opened to waitlist members, and is now available to anyone seeking affordable AI compute. It’s powered by a decentralized operating system called Hyper-dOS, and provides renters with cost savings of up to 75% compared with traditional cloud-based GPUs. Moreover, anyone who has idle GPUs now has a way to monetize those resources.

Hyperbolic’s GPU network also powers a second service for AI inference. Through that service, which processes more than 1 billion tokens daily, customers can select a wide variety of open-source large language models, as well as proprietary models available at lower costs. The startup says its AI Inference service is unique in that it leverages a “Proof-of-Sampling” protocol to ensure reliable and cost-effective outputs.

Variant’s managing partner Jesse Walden said this is what really got his attention. “Hyperbolic is the first player we’ve encountered that addresses the ‘cost of trust’ issue in decentralized GPU networks, and it does so without sacrificing performance, quality or user experience,” he said.

Having secured its latest funds, Hyperbolic said it’s planning to expand its engineering, go-to-market and strategic teams. It will also use some of the money to fund the development of its own blockchain network for managing GPU resources, and incubate an ecosystem of third-party compute and inference services to expand its AI rainforest.

Featured image: SiliconANGLE/Luma AI