General Catalyst, Redpoint Fuel Modal's AI Infrastructure Push With $355 Million Raise
Artificial intelligence and serverless cloud computing company Modal Labs closed a Series C round totaling $355 million, putting the company at a $4.65 billion post-money valuation. The company said it has expanded fivefold since September and is now above $300 million in annualized revenue.
The financing was led by General Catalyst and Redpoint, with Menlo, Bain Capital Ventures and Accel coming in as new backers, the company revealed in a press release.
Modal framed its product as a cloud infrastructure designed around AI workloads rather than traditional web apps, pointing to use cases ranging from elastic inference to reinforcement learning and large-scale batch processing. Developers are increasingly moving from relying on frontier model APIs to running and tuning their own models to meet latency, throughput, and cost targets, the company stated.
Modal has built its own storage and compute stack and highlighted performance claims such as faster cold starts via GPU snapshotting and the ability to scale from zero to 1,000 GPUs within minutes.
In 2023, Modal built "Sandboxes" to run untrusted, AI-generated code in isolated environments, and more than one billion sandboxes have been launched on its platform. It also said sandboxes now account for more than one-third of revenue.
"We’re expanding the Sandbox surface with new capabilities and the scale to run millions in parallel. Simultaneously, we recognize agentic development is here. Modal is code, which makes it already a great place for agents to work. We’re going to keep improving here, starting by shipping granular RBAC so customers can give agents the capability without risk. The AI infrastructure layer is just getting started. So are we," the company wrote.
Modal's future roadmap includes more work on large-scale inference, tightening the loop between training and serving for reinforcement learning, and expanding sandbox capabilities, including granular role-based access controls.
Modal was founded by Akshat Bubna and Erik Bernhardsson in 2021. The company has grown from $60 million to $400 million in annualized revenue, driven by surging demand for AI code and model interference. The company has also expanded its network to work with 13 cloud providers, an increase from five the previous year, Dealroom reported.
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