Funding led by Redpoint Ventures with Series Seed lead Amplify Partners, participation from Lux Capital, Definition Capital and others brings total raised to $23 million.

Early customers Ramp, Substack, SphinxBio and others use Modal to save time and ship faster.

NEW YORK, NY - October 10, 2023 - Modal Labs, a leading provider of cloud-based infrastructure, today announced its Series A financing round, securing $16 million in investment to help advance its vision of building an end-to-end technology stack for data teams. The company also announced the official launch of its platform, which was previously in beta mode with early customers including Ramp, Substack, SphinxBio and others.

Led by Redpoint Ventures and existing investor Amplify Partners, with participation from Lux Capital, Definition Capital and others, this financing round brings the total raised by Modal to date to $23 million. Modal will use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its efforts to attract more enterprise customers across industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to financial services. To start, the company will be hiring additional engineers to join its team at its New York City headquarters.

With the rise of generative AI applications, data teams are confronted with increasingly complex and compute-intensive tasks. The suite of technology solutions currently on the market are fragmented and tedious to use, leading to developers spending too much time stitching together different tools and platforms instead of actually writing code that impacts the user experience. Modal solves for these specific pain points by making it easy to run code in the cloud, without the need for owned infrastructure. Today, Modal’s platform serves a wide range of customers, with applications ranging from generative AI to biotech and 3D rendering.

“I started Modal because I believe that data teams deserve better. From my experience at companies like Spotify and Better, I could see that the current landscape of tools is inadequate, often requiring the stitching together of multiple different platforms and other tedious tasks,” said Erik Bernhardsson, Founder, Modal Labs. “My vision is to create a suite of tools that will help anyone with complex computing needs be much more productive. Today, we are starting by making our cloud-based infrastructure offering available to developers large and small. I’m looking forward to bringing Modal to more users as we move forward in the next steps in our journey.”

“At Redpoint, we are huge believers in the promise of cloud-based infrastructure and ultimately, a full end-to-end stack that caters to the specific needs of data teams” said Patrick Chase, Partner at Redpoint Ventures. “The timing could not be better for Erik and the team at Modal to expand the availability of their platform and we look forward to supporting their growth.”

“There are companies out there that will enable data teams to capture value when a paradigm shift occurs. Then there are the companies that bring about the paradigm shift themselves. We believe Modal is one of the latter, and that they will fundamentally change how data and engineering teams work by addressing all of the challenges they face when making new products.”

-Sarah Catanzaro, General Partner, Amplify Partners.”

Today, data teams that are interested in running code in the cloud can sign up at Modal.com - paying only for the compute power they use.

Additional Quotes

“Ramp uses Modal to run some of our most data-intensive projects. Our team loves the developer experience because it allows them to be more productive and move faster. Without Modal, these projects would have been impossible for us to launch. Modal’s user-friendly interface and efficient tools have truly empowered our team to navigate data-intensive tasks with ease, enabling us to achieve our project goals more efficiently.”

— Karim Atiyeh, Co-Founder and CTO, Ramp

“Substack recently launched a feature for AI-powered audio transcriptions. The data team picked Modal because it makes it easy to write code that runs on 100s of GPUs in parallel, transcribing podcasts in a fraction of the time.”

— Mike Cohen, Head of Data, Substack

“Sphinx has been using Modal to run protein folding models on behalf of drug discoverers and scientific researchers. Modal lets us scale up and run large-scale batch jobs in a few lines of code, and it completely removes the need to think about infrastructure.”

— Nicholas Larus-Stone, Founder, SphinxBio

“Modal is the self-provisioning runtime I always wanted for Python - all the scalability and statefulness of cloud services with the developer experience of local development, and all infrastructure requirements defined alongside the code that uses it. I will not miss the configuration nightmares that always haunted cloud development now that I can use Modal.”

— Shawn Wang, Swyx.io

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