Market for AI model inference — future capacity, bought today
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States | Founded: 2026 | Employees: 2 | Stage: Seed (Y Combinator S26) | Website: https://touchmark.ai
Touchmark runs a marketplace for buying AI computing capacity in advance. A buyer picks a model and a future month, buys a fixed block of tokens at a posted price, then uses them through one key that works like any other AI provider. Committing earlier buys a bigger discount — the company describes up to 20% below list price, and up to 30% or more for large orders negotiated directly. Payment is in dollars. On the other side, model providers sell capacity ahead of time, which locks in revenue up front and helps them plan and pay for new chips against demand they can see instead of guessing. Touchmark sells ordinary blocks on named models; a 'Top-1' contract that lets a buyer commit to whichever model ends up leading a published ranking before it is chosen; and contracts on models that have not launched yet, priced in a neutral unit of work that converts into tokens once the model is available. Unused contracts can be resold in some cases, and trading is restricted to business buyers and sellers. The company was founded in 2026 in San Francisco by Ilia Bolgov, previously in product at Revolut, and Roman Yanushevskyi, a former quantitative researcher at Citadel Securities.
Touchmark is trying to turn AI capacity into a traded commodity, which is a genuinely new idea for the sector. Today every deal to reserve computing power is a private negotiation: the price depends on who is asking, the commitment cannot be resold, and providers fund years of chip purchases against demand they cannot see. Touchmark's fix is a marketplace with posted prices, where buyers commit early for a discount and providers sell ahead against visible demand. The economics are easy to follow — about 20% below list, paid in dollars, used through a single key. The hard part is liquidity: a market with few participants is worse than none, and this is a two-person company.
Browse: Home | Blog | About | All Startups A-Z | View full profile on StartupWiki