Hyperbolic is an open-access AI cloud built for developers and researchers. It aggregates underutilized GPUs from data centers, mining farms and idle machines into an on-demand marketplace, and pairs that with serverless inference for state-of-the-art open-source models. The pitch is simple: fast, affordable access to compute and inference without sales calls or feature gates, at prices it says can run up to 75% below incumbents.
Meltem Demirors is a Turkish-American crypto investor, venture capitalist, and the founder and general partner of Crucible Capital - a $50M seed fund at the intersection of energy, compute, and crypto. Previously Chief Strategy Officer at CoinShares (where she helped grow AUM to $7B and take the firm public), she's also a prolific angel investor with 250+ bets, an Oxford lecturer, a World Economic Forum council member, and the self-described 'benevolent mischief-maker' who testified before Congress on Facebook's Libra in 2019.
On March 31, 2026, OpenAI closed the largest private funding round in history — $122 billion in committed capital at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. Anchored by Amazon ($50B), Nvidia ($30B), and SoftBank ($30B), with continued participation from Microsoft and a sweeping syndicate of global institutions, the round dwarfs every prior private tech raise and cements OpenAI as the world's most valuable startup by a wide margin. The company is generating $2 billion in monthly revenue, counting 900 million weekly ChatGPT users, and is widely expected to pursue an IPO.
RunPod is an AI cloud infrastructure company that provides on-demand GPU compute for training, fine-tuning, and deploying AI/ML models. Founded in 2022 by two former Comcast engineers who pivoted their Ethereum mining rigs into AI servers, RunPod grew to $120M ARR with just $22M raised by early 2026, serving 500,000+ developers across 183 countries. Its marketplace model, per-second billing, and support for 30+ GPU SKUs — from consumer RTX 4090s to enterprise H100s and B200s — make it a capital-efficient disruptor to hyperscaler GPU clouds like AWS, GCP, and Azure.