Facebook, Lyft alum raises seed round to build encrypted AI model marketplace

What's the deal? PerlaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a former Facebook engineer and early Lyft hire, has closed a seed round for a startup aiming to challenge OpenRouter, the marketplace that routes developer requests across competing AI models.

What's the endgame? Perla wants to build the "New York Token Exchange," a marketplace where thousands of models from thousands of hosting providers compete to serve each request. The goal is to turn AI tokens into a tradeable commodity — complete with futures, hedges, and price indices, like oil or electricity.

Who's the buyer? He is targeting businesses whose AI spending is ballooning but that also want to keep their data private. Encryption is central to the pitch: "If we all encrypt our AI chats," Perla said, "we can slow down" the cycle in which frontier labs absorb user data to train future models.

Why now? Open-weight models are proliferating. Perla said Chinese models from DeepSeek, Zhipu, and Moonshot are among the most popular on his platform, and recent weeks have brought Western open-weight releases from Reflection AI and Mistral. Meta released what it called "the most capable US open-weight model to date."

What could go wrong? Perla wants a more vibrant American open-source ecosystem, but the most popular models on his own platform are Chinese — a tension for a founder pitching US businesses on privacy and control.

The signal: The plan to stage "model IPOs" for new open-weight releases reflects a broader bet: that AI inference is becoming a commodity. As open models multiply and hosting providers compete on price, the value may shift from building models to the exchanges that route and trade them.

Read more: Semafor

Image credit: Generated with Gemini