Modal

Modal provides cloud infrastructure for developers running AI inference, training, batch processing and agents. Its Modal SDK lets teams define application logic, container images, hardware and storage in Python, then execute workloads with autoscaling and usage-based pricing. Developers can serve language, image and audio models, fine-tune models, or run parallel data jobs. Modal Sandboxes provides isolated environments for executing untrusted code, including coding agents and reinforcement-learning rollouts.

Work on Modal began in 2021, and the platform became generally available in 2023. Its founders are CEO Erik Bernhardsson and CTO Akshat Bubna. Modal’s engineering focuses on reducing the startup work that makes elastic GPU computing difficult: its custom filesystem loads container files on demand, while CPU and CUDA checkpoint restoration reuse initialized application state. These mechanisms let inference replicas start without repeating much of their setup, helping capacity respond to variable demand.

By May 2026, the company reported more than 1 billion cumulative sandbox launches, with Sandboxes contributing over one-third of revenue. It also reported exceeding $300 million in annualized revenue. That month, Modal raised a $355 million Series C led by General Catalyst and Redpoint at a $4.65 billion post-money valuation.