❯ Modal raises a $750 million Series D at a $15.75 billion valuation as annualized revenue tops $1 billion

Valuation tripled in monthsAI infrastructure company Modal announced on its official blog a $750 million Series D at a $15.75 billion post-money valuation, led by Accel, with Kleiner Perkins joining as a new investor and existing backers including Menlo Ventures and General Catalyst participating. The company also said its annualized revenue run rate has passed $1 billion, with revenue up more than 15 times year over year. TechCrunch previously reported that Modal was valued at $4.65 billion four months earlier.

Running the servers for developersModal sells “serverless” AI compute: developers write the code, and Modal schedules GPUs, starts containers and runs the jobs, drawing on capacity from more than 20 clouds. Customers use it for model inference, image generation and training, and to give AI coding agents isolated “sandbox” environments to run in. Modal says sandboxes alone have reached about a $300 million run rate, with nearly 3 billion sandboxes launched so far.

Customers across industriesNamed customers include coding-agent maker Cognition, fintech company Ramp, music generator Suno, video generator Runway, and robotics companies Physical Intelligence and 1X. Modal has more than 200 employees in New York, San Francisco and Stockholm. The blog did not say exactly how the new money will be spent.

AI startups don't want to manage GPUsBuying and scheduling GPUs is costly and labor-intensive for many AI startups. Modal lets them pay by usage and scale up or down at will, turning compute into something closer to a utility. Agents need large numbers of short-lived, isolated environments, and the rapid growth of sandbox revenue shows that this new demand can already support a business of its own.

▮ SIGNALThe more agents there are, the bigger the business of giving them somewhere to work; sandboxes, once an overlooked piece of infrastructure, are becoming a billion-dollar revenue line.