OpenRelay is Backed by Y Combinator

The problem: compute is the bottleneck

The biggest thing standing between a developer and a working AI product is access to GPUs. The best hardware is scarce, expensive, and locked behind long-term contracts and waitlists at a small number of hyperscalers. If you're a startup, a researcher, or a team shipping inference at scale, you spend more time fighting for capacity than building.

Meanwhile, an enormous amount of GPU capacity sits idle: in data centers, in independent providers' racks, and in high-end consumer machines around the world. The compute exists. The problem is that it's fragmented, unreliable on its own, and hard to use as a single, dependable resource.

Why a distributed network is the answer

OpenRelay turns that fragmented capacity into one network. We run a distributed GPU overlay: a control plane that coordinates GPU nodes across many locations through secure tunnels, with health checks and automatic failover built in. When a node degrades, traffic routes around it. When you need more capacity, it's already on the network.

We think of it as the CDN of inference. A CDN took a hard distributed-systems problem, serving content fast and reliably from everywhere, and turned it into something a developer invokes without thinking about the machines underneath. We're doing the same thing for GPU compute: deploy a container or rent a GPU in seconds, and let the network handle scheduling, isolation, and resilience.

Because we aggregate capacity instead of building new data centers from scratch, we can offer the same hardware (H100s, A100s, and more) at 73-79% less than AWS, GCP, and other major clouds, with no contracts and no commitments.

Why Y Combinator, and why now

Y Combinator backed many of the platforms developers now reach for by default. That is our bar: OpenRelay should be the obvious choice when you need a GPU.

The timing matters. Demand for inference is growing faster than the world can pour concrete for new data centers, and the gap between who can get compute and who can't is widening. A distributed network is the most capital-efficient, fastest-to-scale way to close that gap, because it puts existing hardware to work instead of building everything new. YC's backing lets us move faster on all of it.

What's next

Next, we're working on three things:

• More capacity: onboarding more GPU providers and hardware tiers so the GPU you want is always a click away.
• A faster, more reliable network: deeper investment in the control plane, scheduling, and fault-tolerance that make distributed compute feel like one machine.
• A better developer experience: making it trivial to go from idea to deployed inference, whether you're running a model, a container, or a fleet of build runners.

We're grateful to Y Combinator, to the providers who power the network, and to the developers building on OpenRelay every day.