GPU prices are hard to read and harder to negotiate. Stoa, a US-based startup founded in 2026, is betting that the fix is a marketplace where buyers and verified suppliers meet, plus a data product that tells companies what their hardware is actually worth.
The company was founded by Berat Çelik, Eren Berke Sağlam and Kaan Yiğit, and is part of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch. It is starting with the US market and plans to expand internationally in the coming months, according to Webrazzi.
On Stoa Markets, a buyer posts what it needs and verified suppliers respond with quotes. When the buyer accepts one, the deal becomes binding and Stoa coordinates the rest of the process, working with third parties on inspection, shipping, insurance and financing. Its second product, Stoa Intelligence, concentrates on valuation: an accelerator's price depends not only on the model but on its specifications and workload, so Stoa uses data from completed transactions to give companies a reference value for the hardware they hold.
Stoa says its network already spans hundreds of buyers and suppliers in AI hardware and that it has observed more than $500 million in transaction activity in the GPU market. It earns revenue from fees on completed hardware deals and from Stoa Intelligence subscriptions, and has not disclosed how much it has raised. The next goal is more ambitious: financial products that companies can use to hedge against changes in GPU values, which Stoa plans to offer in 2027.
That last step is where the story gets interesting. If GPUs become an asset class with a reference price, the same instruments that exist for commodities — forwards, hedges, indexes — become plausible for compute. The risk is that a private marketplace's own transaction data becomes both the benchmark and the venue, a combination regulators have looked at closely in other markets. For now, Stoa is a young company with a hypothesis: that the hardware behind the AI boom is valuable enough to need a market of its own.
