Butter is joining Modal

Today we're excited to announce that Butter is joining Modal!

Butter founder Erik Dunteman and researcher Raymond Tana will be joining the Modal Sandbox team as part of the acquisition.

Expanding Modal Sandboxes

The Butter team's experience is in agent harness engineering, with past focuses on computer-use agents, deterministic memory systems, skills, and codegen. Most recently, they created bVisor, a virtual linux kernel built from scratch in Zig to solve their own need for lightweight, ephemeral sandboxes.

By bringing Butter's engineering and expertise to Modal, we're taking one step closer to making Modal Sandboxes a best-in-class product experience.

“ I've become convinced that code generation is the solution to many of the challenges we faced building AI agents at Butter. Determinism, auditability, fine-grained permissioning—it's all codegen. I believe there is no better team in the world than Modal to support this at a platform level.”

— Erik Dunteman, Founder and CEO, Butter

Modal's relationship with Erik (Dunteman) goes years back, starting from his time as cofounder of Banana, a serverless GPU platform. What started as a friendly rivalry turned into mutual respect, with Erik briefly contracting with Modal before going on to start Butter. We are thrilled to welcome him back home.

Butter is joining Modal

Expanding Modal Sandboxes

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