Modal

Modal is a serverless compute platform founded in 2022 by Erik Bernhardsson and headquartered in New York, NY. The platform enables developers, data scientists, and AI teams to run Python functions on cloud infrastructure—including CPU, GPU, and memory-intensive workloads—without provisioning or managing servers. Users deploy code by decorating Python functions with Modal decorators, and the platform handles scaling, containerization, and resource allocation automatically.

Modal's primary product is a Python SDK and cloud execution environment that supports GPU-accelerated workloads commonly used in machine learning model training, inference, and batch data processing. The platform targets AI researchers, ML engineers, and data teams who need on-demand access to compute resources such as NVIDIA A100 and H100 GPUs. Modal competes with services like AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Run, and specialized ML infrastructure providers such as Replicate and RunPod.

Modal raised a $16 million Series A round in 2023 and subsequently closed a $45 million Series B round in 2024, bringing total disclosed funding to approximately $67 million. The company was co-founded by Erik Bernhardsson, previously CTO of Better.com and an engineering leader at Spotify, where he created the Luigi data pipeline framework. Modal employs fewer than 50 people as of 2024.