Modal

Erik Bernhardsson identified a gap around 2020 between the needs of data scientists and engineers and the infrastructure work required to run code in the cloud. Work on Modal began in 2021, with Bernhardsson and Akshat Bubna as co-founders. Bernhardsson had previously held engineering and technology leadership roles at Spotify and Better.⁠[1][2][3]

The platform gained its first users in 2022, initially among engineers known to the team, before expanding through a waitlist. Development centered on writing code locally and running it remotely on demand, with early workloads informing the product.⁠[1]

Modal opened registration to the public and announced a $16 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures, bringing total funding to $23 million. Amplify Partners had led the seed round. Developers could define execution environments and resources in Python for endpoints, batch jobs, scheduled tasks and storage. Named early users included Ramp, Substack, Suno and Sphinx Bio.⁠[1][3]

Modal announced an $87 million Series B led by Lux Capital at a $1.1 billion post-money valuation, bringing total funding to $111 million. Its product range included inference, sandboxes, batch processing, training and notebooks. The company highlighted AI agents and reinforcement learning as emerging workloads, including code execution for Meta’s CWM project.⁠[4]

Modal announced a $355 million Series C at a $4.65 billion post-money valuation, led by General Catalyst and Redpoint. New investors included Menlo Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and Accel. The announcement traced its sandbox product to users running AI-generated code in 2023 and described further expansion in inference and reinforcement-learning infrastructure.⁠[5]

At its inaugural Runtime event, Modal introduced VM Sandboxes with full Linux environments for Docker, development servers, graphical applications and mobile emulators. Sidecars provide separately isolated companion containers on the same host for functions such as credentials and proxy services. Modal Clusters also became generally available for coordinating multiple containers in large training or inference jobs.⁠[6]

The same update included Sticky Sessions, which use a session token to direct related requests to the same container and preserve state. Endpoint Candidates mirror production traffic to candidate configurations for comparing quality, latency and cost. Candidates were in private beta at the time of the announcement.⁠[6]

Modal builds its own filesystem, container runtime, scheduler and image builder, supplying compute from multiple cloud capacity sources. Applications include inference, fine-tuning and training, media generation, life-science computing and isolated execution of agent-generated code. Sandboxes support custom images, filesystem snapshots and network egress controls, with permissions configured for each workload.⁠[2][5][7]

The platform bills for compute usage, including container loading, request processing and keep-alive time. Scaling a container to zero ends its compute charges, while storage and network egress can be billed separately; some shared endpoints use token-based pricing. Cost management therefore depends on idle windows, resource selection and ancillary services as well as active processing time.⁠[8]

Website: https://modal.com/ (opens in a new window). X: https://x.com/modal (opens in a new window). LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: https://www.linkedin.com/company/modal-labs/ (opens in a new window). YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: https://www.youtube.com/@ModalLabs (opens in a new window).⁠[2][9][10][11]