io.net

io.net is a decentralized GPU cloud that aggregates idle graphics-processing capacity from independent datacenters, mining operations, and consumer machines into a single on-demand marketplace, orchestrated on the Solana blockchain and settled in the network's IO token. The company started life as a quantitative trading shop; its founders' need to run distributed workloads across scattered GPUs without paying hyperscaler rates became the product, and io.net now positions itself as the alternative to AWS, Google, and CoreWeave for teams that want cheaper compute and are willing to trade the polish of a single-operator cloud for a heterogeneous pool.

The network's distinguishing bet is aggregation rather than construction: instead of building or leasing megawatt-scale campuses, io.net writes software (built on the open-source Ray framework) that stitches geographically dispersed GPUs into clusters a customer can rent by the hour. That model gives the company breadth across NVIDIA generations (A100, H100, H200 and consumer cards such as RTX 4090s all appear in its inventory dashboard) but it also means capacity, uptime, and location commitments are supplier-mediated rather than owned, which sets io.net apart from asset-heavy neoclouds like CoreWeave, Crusoe, or Nebius.

The company raised a $30 million Series A led by Hack VC in March 2024 (with Multicoin, Solana Ventures, Aptos Labs, and Delphi participating) and launched the IO token on Solana in June 2024. Founder Ahmad Shadid stepped down as CEO in late 2024 and was replaced by Tory Green, previously chief operating officer, amid a broader reset toward enterprise inference customers and away from a purely retail-DePIN narrative.