Itô team joins Jump Trading to run newly formed compute trading desk

Itô co-founder Affaan said the Itô team has joined trading firm Jump Trading and will take charge of its compute trading business. Affaan and fellow co-founder Alejandro said the team will lead a newly created internal compute trading desk at Jump and has already begun trading in what they described as an emerging market. According to their account, Itô originally set out to use a new contract market to help companies deal with centralized AI supply chain risks that existing systems do not cover well. After speaking with more than 1,000 funds, companies, venture capital firms and other market participants, the team decided to focus on the middle market for compute capacity and inference costs. Affaan also said standard capacity contracts often run three to five years and usually require about 30% upfront payment, while late-seed to Series C companies often generate revenue on a monthly, usage-based basis. He added that contract values for related mid-sized market clusters can sometimes reach the hundreds of millions to mid-hundreds of millions of dollars.