Touchmark wants to turn AI inference into a futures market — TFN

Touchmark is making AI tokens a tradable commodity.

An organization that already is aware of it’ll spend closely on AI in September will pay for that month now and get their tokens at a reduction of as much as 30% – or extra for bigger orders by way of direct quotes. On Touchmark, a forwards market which opens to industrial consumers and sellers this week, a billion tokens on a named mannequin is a single pay as you go contract with a supply window connected, drawn down by way of an API when the window arrives. 

Touchmark is a two-person firm, a part of Y Combinator’s Summer season 2026 batch. Its premise is  that inference is changing into a commodity, and commodities find yourself with markets.

Touchmark is addressing a major budgeting problem many corporations are dealing with. Enterprise AI spending roughly doubled 12 months over 12 months in 2026, to a mean of about $1.2 million per group, and 78 % of IT leaders reported fees they’d not budgeted for. Brokers made it worse. A single autonomous workflow can devour many instances the tokens of a one-shot question, quietly, over hours. Finance groups snug forecasting seat licenses have spent the 12 months discovering that they can not forecast this.

Touchmark permits a purchaser to select a mannequin, a token quantity, a most popular supplier, and a supply window, pays in full up entrance, and consumes the capability by way of an API like another endpoint. The sooner the acquisition, the deeper the low cost. Nothing in it asks the customer to consider something past what it’ll use and when.

Subsequent to the listed contracts sits a request-for-quote board, dwell at launch. A purchaser posts precisely what it wants, mannequin or fashions, quantity, supply window, throughput and latency flooring, denominated in tokens, devoted GPUs, or reserved throughput. Suppliers then compete to cite in opposition to it. Provide skews towards open-weight households: Kimi, GLM, Qwen. That follows the market moderately than main it. OpenRouter’s routing information confirmed Chinese language open-weight fashions crossing right into a majority of the tokens it processes by the center of this 12 months, most of them priced effectively beneath the U.S. frontier.

Touchmark’s first inference supplier, Wafer, is acknowledged as one of many main inference suppliers by throughput. For a supplier, the attraction is timing: income in the present day in opposition to capability that won’t be served for months. Capability sits underused in a single month and runs brief within the subsequent, and the business’s present reply to that hole is a sequence of personal one-off offers.

“Inference is changing into one of many largest prices for corporations in the present day, however the market continues to be extraordinarily fragmented. Pricing for reserved capability is bilateral and consumers have little or no visibility into what a good ahead worth truly is,” stated Ilia Bolgov, Touchmark’s co-founder and CEO. “As inference spend grows, corporations want the identical primary devices each giant market finally develops: worth discovery, ahead buying, and the flexibility to resell unused capability. That’s the market we’re constructing at Touchmark.“

Bolgov got here to the issue from the quantitative finance aspect. He graduated first in his cohort in arithmetic at Cardiff College earlier than an MSc in arithmetic and finance at Imperial Faculty London, then labored in product at Revolut’s wealth and buying and selling division, constructing superior merchandise for superior merchants. That mixture of mathematical coaching and hands-on expertise constructing merchandise inside a fast-growing scale-up formed his method to Touchmark: treating market design as each a mathematical drawback and a product drawback.His co-founder, Roman Yanushevskyi, constructed the platform. Yanushevskyi took gold on the 2022 Worldwide Olympiad in Informatics held in Indonesia, ending seventh out of 349 opponents from 88 nations. He spent two stints as a quantitative analysis intern at Citadel Securities on the choices workforce, and earlier than that hung out at Lovable in 2024, through the firm’s early days because it grew out of the open-source GPT Engineer undertaking, engaged on its analysis and benchmarking pipeline. Lovable has since been valued at $13.3 billion. Roman completed a four-year laptop science and arithmetic diploma on the Nationwide College of Singapore in three years.

“Suppliers promoting spot capability can’t understand how a lot demand they’ll have tomorrow,” Yanushevskyi stated. “Little demand means wasted GPU hours and losses. An excessive amount of demand results in unavailability for some clients, who could due to this fact churn. The present resolution is committed-capacity offers. Nonetheless, all such offers in the present day are bespoke and negotiated case by case. No comfort and no transparency for both aspect. Nobody is aware of the proper worth. The finance business, nonetheless, solves all these issues at scale.”

They’re early to an idea that has quickly gained momentum. On Could 12, CME Group and Silicon Information stated they might convey compute futures to market, and every week later ICE and Ornn introduced GPU compute futures referencing Ornn’s Compute Value Index. This Monday, Jensen Huang pitched AI compute to buyers as a brand new asset class. These devices monitor the price of renting {hardware}. Touchmark sells the served output of that {hardware}, within the items a purchaser truly consumes. Inference suppliers, for his or her half, already supply reserved capability and committed-use reductions, every by itself paper, to its personal clients, at costs nobody else will get to see.

The concept is {that a} standardized contract with suppliers quoting in opposition to one another beats negotiating each deal privately. The apparent threat is the fashions. Shopping for six months of capability on a named mannequin assumes it’ll nonetheless be the best mannequin in six months, in a 12 months when the open-weight leaderboard has turned over repeatedly. Touchmark’s reply is contracts for best-in-class capability that resolves into whichever mannequin tops a public benchmark at supply time.

As soon as one thing will get traded on a market, it often finally ends up with a worth everybody can quote. Touchmark has been open about anticipating the identical for intelligence. Finally there will probably be a broadcast worth index for it, however that’s a great distance off. For now, the one query on Friday’s agenda is what a September token is price.