❯ Modal raises $750 million in Series D as its valuation climbs to $15.75 billion within a year

Valuation more than triples in five monthsModal announced on October 14 that it raised $750 million in Series D at a $15.75 billion post-money valuation. Accel led, Kleiner Perkins joined, and existing investors including Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, Redpoint and Lux Capital took part. The company says it is on pace to bring in more than $1 billion a year, up more than 15x from a year ago.

Managing GPUs for developersModal is a cloud computing platform. Developers hand it the programs they need to run, and it schedules GPUs for inference, training and code execution, so they don’t have to buy graphics cards or build schedulers; they pay for what they use. To do this, Modal built its own file system, container runtime, scheduler and networking from scratch, drawing compute from more than 20 cloud providers.

Who uses itNamed customers include DoorDash’s AI platform team; Cognition, Ramp and Linear run background agents on it, Runway generates video, Physical Intelligence and 1X train robots, and Suno makes music. On May 21 Modal raised $355 million at a $4.65 billion valuation, when annualized revenue had just passed $300 million; usage has tripled since.

Agents' code needs somewhere to runThe fastest-growing piece is Sandboxes: code written by AI agents runs in an isolated environment so mistakes don’t affect other systems. The product, launched in 2023, now has a $300 million run rate; Modal has started close to 3 billion sandboxes and can run up to a million at once. The more work agents do, the more demand there is for running their code.

Training is nextModal also launched multi-node training: one line of code gets a cluster of high-speed-connected GPUs with no capacity commitment. VM sandboxes are now generally available, and reinforcement learning and post-training products are next. The company has more than 200 employees in New York, San Francisco and Stockholm.

▮ SIGNALEvery extra task an agent takes on means more compute to rent, and selling the “place to run” is becoming as big a business as selling models.