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Fintech · Wealth & investing

Stoa

The market behind AI hardware

Building the foundation of AI capex market.
San Fransisco, CA136 followers
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About

Stoa is a request-for-quote marketplace for GPUs, aimed at buyers, sellers, and lenders who currently move AI hardware through group chats, forwarded spreadsheets, and phone calls. Buyers post a spec (anything from a single H100 or H200 to a full Blackwell cluster, new or secondary), vetted dealers bid blind with firm quotes, and the RFQ closes within 48 hours . Stoa also runs KYB and counterparty checks and handles contracts, shipping, and settlement, so the trade actually clears rather than dying in due diligence. The launch matters because AI hardware is turning into a real asset class without any of the plumbing an asset class needs. Lenders currently mark billions in GPU collateral off appraisals rather than trades , and buyers routinely get wildly different quotes on the same card. By running every RFQ, bid, award, and settlement through one venue, Stoa is trying to generate the price history that financing and hedging products can eventually be built on, positioning the marketplace as step one toward a broader AI capex market. The company is based in San Francisco and is part of Y Combinator's S26 batch, founded by Berat Celik, Eren Berke Saglam, and Kaan Yigit . The team's pitch is grounded in having sat inside those broker chats themselves, and the launch coincides with a wave of H100 fleets rotating out as Blackwell deployments ramp, which is exactly the moment secondary GPU liquidity becomes a real problem worth solving.
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Comments (14)
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Priya Nadkarni9d ago

48 hour firm quotes on GPUs is wild given how much dealers currently love ghosting after the first email. Curious what your margin capture looks like once volume ramps.

Arjun Bhattacharya9d ago

Counterparty checks are the actual moat here, not the RFQ flow. Everyone can build a form, nobody wants to underwrite the guy selling H100s out of a Miami warehouse.

Tobias Okafor9d ago

So you built eBay for the machines that will eventually replace us. Bold to speedrun our own obsolescence but I respect the hustle.

Lena Marchetti9d ago

Tagline could hit harder. Try 'Price discovery for the picks and shovels' and thank me in the seed round.

Kenji Alvarado9d ago

The sealed-bid RFQ framing in the tweet is clean. No screenshots, no fluff, just the mechanic and a promise, which is refreshing on this timeline.

Sigrid Halvorsen9d ago

Landing page is clean but 'send a spec' is doing a lot of heavy lifting. What does the first tap actually look like, a form, an upload, a chat?

Maya Osei9d ago

Any API for submitting specs programmatically or is this a web-form-only situation? Would love webhooks when quotes land instead of refreshing like a maniac.

Sven Lindqvist9d ago

Before I loop in procurement, do you have SSO, an MSA template, and any story around export controls on the secondary side? Asking for a very cautious legal team.

Fatou Diallo9d ago

How many people shipped this? Marketplaces with vetting usually need an army and yet here you are with a live site. Team size reveal when.

Hector Salinas9d ago

Adjacent founder here doing colo brokerage, we should chat. Also mildly annoyed you got to the clean landing page aesthetic first.

Dmitri Volkov9d ago

I've been drafting a GPU broker directory for six months and you just shipped the actual thing. Back to my Notion doc I guess.

Rahul Menon9d ago

This might be the last hardware marketplace built where humans send the specs. Six months from now my agent is negotiating with your dealers while I sleep.

Boris Kaminski9d ago

Remind me why we can't just call Dell? Genuine question, not being cute.

Chidinma Eze9d ago

Would love to know your bid dispersion on the same spec across dealers. That number is either your entire pitch deck or a very awkward slide.