We are excited to announce that Tidbyt is joining Modal. Tidbyt is a NYC-based hardware manufacturer that makes programmable smart home LED screens:

Is Modal putting H100s in Tidbyt devices?

It would have been fun to run the world’s first edge-based GPU network, but that’s not the plan! Really why this is happening is because of the team.

Co-founders Rohan Singh and Mats Linander both worked on container infrastructure at Spotify prior to founding Tidbyt, and they have a ton of experience building complex large-scale systems. A large subset of the Modal team spent time in the same or adjacent teams at Spotify and many know Rohan and Mats really well. In the last few years, Tidbyt has built up a hardware business that has shipped 100,000 devices to consumers.

That’s incredibly cool, and I can personally attest that these devices are amazing — I’ve bought twelve! We hope to benefit not just from their infrastructure skills, but also from what they have learned about acquiring customers and running a business.

Modal founders Erik Bernhardsson (left) and Akshat Bubna (right) with Tidbyt founder Rohan Singh (middle)

What’s next for Tidbyt?

The service will remain running for everyone with existing devices, but no new devices will be shipped. Please refer to Tidbyt’s website for more information.

What’s next for Modal?

Modal is building cloud infrastructure for teams working on data/AI/ML, and we hope to benefit a lot from the skills that the Tidbyt founders bring to the table. Thousands of companies like Suno and Substack use Modal to run a wide range of compute-intensive applications, including large-scale GPU-based inference, fine-tuning LLMs, large batch jobs, and much more.