October 2023 Summaries

Modal Labs announced a $16 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from existing investor Amplify Partners, Lux Capital, Definition Capital, and others, bringing its total funding to $23 million. The company also formally launched its cloud infrastructure platform after a beta period with customers including Ramp, Substack, and SphinxBio. Modal aims to simplify complex, compute-intensive cloud workloads for data and engineering teams by enabling them to run code without managing infrastructure, serving applications in generative AI, biotechnology, and 3D rendering. The funding will support product development, enterprise expansion across sectors such as pharmaceuticals and financial services, and engineering hiring at its New York City headquarters. Customers cited Modal’s ability to scale GPU-based processing and batch jobs while reducing infrastructure-management work, and the platform uses a pay-for-compute pricing model.

Modal has become generally available after being developed since 2021 to simplify cloud infrastructure for data, machine learning, AI, and analytics teams. The Python-based cloud function platform enables developers to run code quickly in the cloud, deploy autoscaling GPU inference endpoints, execute large batch jobs, schedule cron tasks, create web endpoints, and configure images, hardware, and storage entirely through code rather than YAML, with serverless per-second pricing. Modal reports production adoption across generative AI, biotech, financial technology, and media, citing customers including Ramp, Substack, Suno, and Sphinx Bio for workloads such as transcription, music generation, data processing, and protein-folding models. Alongside opening registration to all users, the company announced a $16 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures, with plans to expand language support, develop higher-level data capabilities, and accelerate its broader product roadmap.