Five months ago, Modal was a fast-growing AI infrastructure startup valued at $4.65 billion. Today it is a $15.75 billion company with more than $1 billion in annualized run rate. The New York-based cloud platform announced on October 14 that it has raised a $750 million Series D led by Accel.

Kleiner Perkins joined as a new investor, and every existing backer participated, including Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, Redpoint, Lux Capital and Bain Capital Ventures, according to the company's announcement.

Growth That Is Hard to Believe

The headline metric is the run rate. Modal says it has crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue, that usage has tripled since its Series C roughly five months ago and that revenue has grown more than 15 times year over year. In May, the company had told Reuters its annualized revenue had passed $300 million.

"Since our Series C, usage has tripled and we've grown more than 15x year-over-year," the company wrote in announcing the round.

What Modal Actually Does

Modal lets developers run compute-heavy workloads, from AI model inference to training to autonomous agents, without managing servers. Co-founded in 2021 by CEO Erik Bernhardsson, who previously built data teams at Spotify, and CTO Akshat Bubna, an early engineer at Scale AI, the company built its own file system, container runtime, scheduler and networking from scratch. Its capacity pool spans more than 20 cloud providers.

Two products drive the business. Functions are the core building block for running code, including image generation and LLM inference. Sandboxes are isolated environments used by AI agents, reinforcement learning pipelines and vibe-coding platforms. Sandboxes alone have reached a $300 million run rate, and Modal says it has spun up close to 3 billion of them, scaling to a million running at once.

Who Is Using It

Modal's customer list reads like a who's who of the AI boom. Cognition, Ramp, Linear and Hebbia run background agents on the platform. Runway uses it for video generation, Suno for music, and Physical Intelligence and 1X for robotics training. DoorDash's AI platform team uses Modal to move apps from experiment to production.

Why Investors Are Paying Up

As AI moves from training giant models to serving them to millions of users, inference has become one of the fastest-growing slices of cloud spending. Modal's pitch is that developers want that compute to feel like writing code, not provisioning infrastructure. A 15x growth rate suggests a lot of them agree.

The company says it is launching products in reinforcement learning and post-training, and has recently added multi-node training, HTTP servers and generally available VM Sandboxes. It now employs more than 200 people across New York, San Francisco and Stockholm.

"We can't think of a better time to be building software," Modal said. With $750 million in new capital, it now has the resources to prove its growth curve was not a one-year anomaly.

Source

Modal — "Modal crosses $1B in Annualized Run Rate and raises $750M Series D"