Modal
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Modal Labs is an American AI infrastructure company founded in 2021 by Erik Bernhardsson (former Spotify ML lead and Better.com CTO) and Akshat Bubna (former Scale AI engineer). Both founders are IOI gold medalists (2003 Sweden and 2014 India). The company provides a serverless platform designed for developers to build, deploy, and scale compute-intensive AI applications. Headquartered in New York City with offices in San Francisco and Stockholm, Modal has built every layer of its AI infrastructure from scratch in Rust — including a custom file system, container runtime, scheduler, and GPU memory snapshotting that delivers sub-second cold starts. As of May 2026, Modal raised $355 million in a Series C round at a $4.65 billion post-money valuation, led by General Catalyst and Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Accel, Menlo Ventures, and Bain Capital Ventures. The round closed in two tranches — an initial tranche at $2.5B and a second at $4.65B due to overwhelming investor demand. Revenue has surged fivefold since September 2025, from $60M to approximately $300M in annualized revenue, driven by the explosion in AI-assisted coding and agent infrastructure. Over 1 billion sandboxes have been launched on Modal’s platform, serving customers including Anthropic, Meta, DoorDash, Cognition (Devin), Suno, Physical Intelligence, and Chai Discovery.