io.net is a decentralized GPU network designed to provide computing power for machine learning (ML). By integrating more than 1 million GPUs from independent data centers, cryptocurrency miners, and projects such as Filecoin or Render, io.net aims to combine these resources into DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure network) to create an enterprise-level, decentralized distributed computing network.
For users, io.net is equivalent to a decentralized global idle GPU resource bazaar, where AI engineers or teams can customize and purchase the required GPU computing services according to their needs.
Team background
io.net's founding team has a strong background. Founder and CEO Ahmad Shadid was previously a quantitative system engineer at WhalesTrader. Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Marketing Officer Garrison Yang was formerly the Vice President of Growth and Strategy at Ava Labs. COO Tory Green was formerly the COO of Hum Capital. Vice President of Business Development Angela Yi graduated from Harvard University and is responsible for planning and executing key strategies.
When Ahmad Shadid built a GPU computing network for Dark Tick, a machine learning quantitative trading company, in 2020, he found that the high GPU service fees of cloud service providers became a problem. The huge demand for computing power prompted them to decide to build decentralized distributed computing resources, which subsequently gained attention in the Austin Solana Hacker House.
Products and Technology
Problems faced by users
Limited availability: It usually takes weeks to access hardware using cloud services such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and popular GPU models on the market are usually not available.
Few options: Users have little choice in terms of GPU hardware, location, security level, latency, etc.
High cost: It is very expensive to obtain high-quality GPUs, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per month for training and inference.
Solution
io.net aggregates underutilized GPU resources (such as independent data centers, crypto miners, and crypto projects such as Filecoin and Render) and integrates these resources into DePIN, enabling engineers to obtain a large amount of computing power in the system. It allows ML teams to build inference and model serving workflows across distributed GPU networks and leverage distributed computing libraries to orchestrate and batch training jobs.
In addition, io.net leverages a distributed computing library with advanced hyperparameter tuning to check the best results, optimize scheduling, and simply specify search patterns. It also uses an open source reinforcement learning library to support production-level, highly distributed RL workloads.
Product composition
IO Cloud: for deploying and managing decentralized GPU clusters allocated on demand, seamlessly integrated with IO-SDK, providing a comprehensive solution for scaling artificial intelligence and Python applications.
IO Worker: provides users with a comprehensive and user-friendly interface to efficiently manage their GPU node operations through intuitive network applications.
IO Explorer: provides users with comprehensive statistics and visualizations of all aspects of the GPU cloud, allowing users to easily monitor, analyze, and understand the complex details of the io.net network instantly.
Product features
Decentralized computing network: improves computing efficiency and stability.
Low-cost access: Compared with traditional centralized services, io.net Cloud provides lower access costs.
Distributed cloud cluster: users can choose the right computing resources according to their needs.
Support machine learning tasks: focus on providing computing resources for machine learning engineers.
Development Roadmap
According to the io.net white paper, the roadmap of the project product is: from January to April 2024, V1.0 will be fully released, committed to the decentralization of the io.net ecosystem, enabling it to achieve self-hosting and self-replication.
Financing Information
On March 5, 2024, io.net announced the completion of a $30 million Series A financing, led by Hack VC, with participation from Multicoin Capital, 6th Man Ventures, M13, etc. After financing, io.net's overall valuation is $1 billion.
Market Data
From the official website data from January 2024 to March 2024, the total number of visits was 5.212M, the average monthly visit was 1.737M, and the bounce rate was 18.61%. The user access data in each region is relatively uniform, and direct visits and search visits account for more than 80%.
Competitive Analysis
io.net's core business is decentralized AI computing power, and its biggest competitors are AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The global AI computing market is expected to grow from $19.5 billion in 2022 to $34.66 billion in 2026.
In contrast to the high revenue of cloud service providers, how to improve GPU utilization has become a focus. According to a survey of AI infrastructure, most GPU resources are underestimated, which is a market opportunity for io.net.