Modal raises $750m Series D as AI compute run rate passes $1bn

Modal raises $750m Series D as AI compute run rate passes $1bn

14 October 2026: Modal, a New York company that runs AI workloads on GPUs for developers without them managing servers, has raised $750 million in a Series D at a $15.75 billion post-money valuation. Accel led the round and Kleiner Perkins joined, with every existing investor taking part. Modal says it has crossed $1 billion in annualised run rate, five months after its Series C.

Not yet independently verified. The run rate, growth and Sandboxes figures are Modal's own and were not independently checked. Modal's post does not state its founding year beyond starting the company five years ago. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Growth Modal reports

In a post announcing the round, co-founder and chief executive Erik Bernhardsson says usage has tripled since the Series C and the business has grown more than 15 times year on year. He calls it "no sign of slowing down". The existing investors he names are Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, Redpoint, Lux Capital, Amplify Partners and Bain Capital Ventures.

Sandboxes, isolated environments that Modal launched in 2023 for running code generated by language models, is now a $300 million run-rate product on its own, according to the company. Modal says it has started close to three billion sandboxes and that they scale to a million running at once. Its customers include DoorDash's AI platform team, Cognition, Ramp, Linear and Hebbia, which build background agents, the video generator Runway and the robotics company Physical Intelligence.

What the money is for

Bernhardsson describes Modal as infrastructure rebuilt for AI, with its own file system, container runtime, scheduler and networking on a capacity pool spread across more than 20 clouds. The company has recently added multi-node training, in which one decorator gives a fully RDMA-connected cluster without a capacity commitment, made virtual machines generally available in Sandboxes, and says it is moving up the stack with products for reinforcement learning and post-training.

Modal has more than 200 staff across New York, San Francisco and Stockholm. BusinessCloud reports that it has also opened a London office, with Hugh Killingbeck-Jones joining as vice president for EMEA to build sales, solutions engineering and partnership teams. "We think London is the AI capital of Europe," Bernhardsson wrote.

From Spotify to a $15.75 billion valuation

Bernhardsson, who is Swedish and began his career at Spotify, started Modal about five years ago, according to his post.

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Company profile on TrustList: Modal

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• Should you raise money at all? The costs, and the alternatives

Sources

• Modal: Modal crosses $1B in Annualized Run Rate and raises $750M Series D, 14 October 2026
• BusinessCloud: Modal Labs valued at almost $16bn after launching in London, 15 October 2026