modal
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Modal
Modal is a serverless cloud platform that lets developers run compute-intensive AI and data workloads - inference, training, fine-tuning, batch jobs, and sandboxed code - without managing infrastructure. Built from scratch in Rust with a custom container runtime, file system, and GPU memory snapshotting, it delivers sub-second cold starts and elastic autoscaling from zero to thousands of GPUs, billed by the second. Founded in 2021 by Erik Bernhardsson and Akshat Bubna, the New York-based company reached roughly $300M in annualized revenue and raised a $355M Series C in 2026 at a $4.65B valuation.
Erik Bernhardsson
Erik Bernhardsson is the founder and CEO of Modal Labs, a serverless cloud platform that gives AI engineers on-demand GPU compute with sub-second container starts. A Swedish engineer trained in physics at KTH, he built the first version of Spotify's music recommendation system (including the groundwork behind Discover Weekly), open-sourced the widely used Luigi and Annoy libraries, then ran a 300-person engineering org at Better.com before starting Modal in 2021. He is also a prolific blogger whose essays on engineering, data teams, and startups reach a large technical audience. In 2026 Modal raised a $355M Series C at a $4.65B valuation.