Modal's $87M Series B (modal.com)

Modal announced an $87M Series B led by Lux Capital, valuing the company at $1.1B and bringing total funding to $111M. The raise backs Modal’s pitch that AI-native companies need AI-native infrastructure: a serverless, code-first platform that pools global GPUs/CPUs, automates capacity management, and focuses on low-latency, fast iteration for ML teams. That positioning matters because as models and demand scale, traditional cloud primitives strain on concurrency, GPU availability, and deployment speed—areas Modal says it has redesigned for AI workloads. Technically, Modal built deep infrastructure components (its own file system, container runtime, scheduler) to deliver sub-second container startups, low-latency routing, and usage-based billing on programmable building blocks for storage, compute, and networking. Its product suite spans inference at thousands of GPUs, secure sandboxed environments (used by Meta for Code World Models), large-scale batch jobs, RDMA-backed training clusters, and near-instant GPU notebooks—supporting tens of thousands of concurrent containers. For the AI/ML community, this promises faster iteration, lower operational overhead for scaling experiments and production models, and a more specialized alternative to generic cloud services for heavyweight, highly concurrent AI workloads.