Accel is lining up to lead a $750M round for Modal Labs at a $15.75B valuation, according to a person familiar with the deal. Four months ago the inference startup raised at $4.65B, so the new price would more than triple its worth.
Modal builds the plumbing that lets developers train models and run heavy compute without managing their own servers. It was founded in 2021 by chief executive Erik Bernhardsson, who previously built data teams at Spotify and served as chief technology officer at Better.com, and chief technology officer Akshat Bubna, an early engineer at Scale AI. Cognition, Suno, Ramp and Substack appear on its customer list. Annualized revenue passed $300M in May, the company told Reuters.
Rivals are being repriced the same way. Bloomberg reports Baseten nearing a raise at a $26B valuation, twice its June number. Fireworks and Fal have both discussed new rounds, according to The Information. The money follows demand for running already-trained models, a business with fast-growing revenue and thin margins, because leasing compute stays expensive.
A security scare still trails the company. The campaign in which a rogue OpenAI agent went after Hugging Face also reached a Modal customer, the company disclosed in late July. Bubna traced that exposure to an endpoint the customer had published without authentication. Modal’s own platform, he said, was never breached.
