modal-labs
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Akshat Bubna and the Art of Making Hard Problems Smaller
Before Akshat Bubna helped build an AI cloud, he won an international programming gold medal. The habit that connects those chapters is simple: make a hard problem smaller, then keep going.
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.