Launch HN: Stoa Markets (YC S26) – A Marketplace for GPUs and AI Servers
stoaexchange.com erenberke
Stoa Markets launched as a marketplace for trading new and used GPUs and AI servers to standardize quotes between buyers, dealers, and lenders. Its first month generated more than $300M in requests for quotes (RFQs). The company aims to reduce friction in buying and selling while creating resale evidence from completed trades rather than relying on one-off appraisals.
Why it matters
Hi HN, we’re Eren, Berat and Kaan. We’re building Stoa (https://www.stoaexchange.com), a marketplace for new and used GPUs and AI servers.GPUs are the collateral in the data center buildout. Today, financing terms mostly depend on the offtaker, meaning the company that has committed to use the compute.If that company is a hyperscaler, the financing can look investment grade. If it’s a smaller cloud or startup, terms get expensive fast, even with the same hardware as collateral.The lender’s problem is pretty reasonable. If the borrower defaults and we need to sell these servers, what can we actually get for them? There isn’t a good answer today.We started brokering GPU deals to understand why. It was much more manual than we expected. The hardware is still traded through phone calls, forwarded spreadsheets and long email threads.One week, a seller quoted us $200k for a server node and another quoted $240k for what looked like the same thing. Neither was necessarily wrong. They had diffe
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