Grid Markets

Mark Ross, a veteran of more than 20 years in senior global technology management with Fortune 500 financial services firms, co-founded Grid Markets. The idea began around 2011 as a consulting engagement. The team noticed that roughly 80% of the high-performance computing servers in the world sit idle, racked, powered, and waiting for work. The founders saw an opportunity to put that capacity to use, the way dark fiber was once put to use, but with dark CPUs.

The company was founded in Singapore in late 2011, and the team engineered a grid architecture to tap those idle machines. Suppliers are not bound by service level agreements or minimum commitments. If one supplier's machines fail, the grid reroutes the work to other locations, so no single supplier is a point of failure. The customer experience is push-button: users do not need to configure or spin up machines, since that orchestration happens behind the scenes. The company holds a patent on the approach.

The pricing started as pay as you go. Customers buy credits, which are consumed against compute hours, at around $1.60 per credit hour. The company gives new users starter credits to get them onto the platform and to collect feedback. Ross said the company is moving toward subscriptions because that is what investors want, and that it will offer both models.

Traction came in the last year or so, mostly from the animation and special effects industry. Studios that make movies and visual effects submit rendering and simulation jobs that would otherwise take months, and get results back in hours. Ross said the company now has over 700 customers, most of whom signed up in the last year.

The company has used its patent and a clear technical story to raise money. Ross described telling investors about customer acquisition and the technical complexity, and investors offered a valuation. Early feedback praised the service as fast and fairly priced. The company has kept its supply variable, renting capacity on demand rather than owning machines, which Ross said helps cash flow. Ross also made clear that the grid does not compete on latency with high-frequency trading infrastructure, since it works as a large supercomputer rather than a low-latency system.

Grid Markets has about 20 people spread across several countries. Ross moved the company to San Francisco to pursue the next stage of growth. The company is processing monthly volume in the millions of credit hours, and the host estimated monthly revenue of about $1.6 million, which Ross agreed was in that neighborhood. Founders and about 10 angels have put in roughly $1 million, and the company is looking to raise $2 million more to expand into financial services and engineering use cases.