Modal becomes latest decacorn after $750M raise to build cloud infrastructure for AI agents

Modal has hit decacorn status with a $750 million raise that priced the company at $15.75 billion, more than triple its $4.65 billion valuation from May 21. Accel led the round. Kleiner Perkins joined, and every existing backer came back too, from Menlo Ventures and General Catalyst to Redpoint, Lux Capital and Bain Capital Ventures.

The speed is the story. Modal says usage has tripled since its Series C and is up more than 15 times year on year, while its annualised run rate has moved past $1 billion. That’s a huge number for a company founded in 2021 by Erik Bernhardsson, a developer who helped build Spotify’s recommendations and later spent six years as CTO of Better.com before deciding the cloud was getting in developers’ way.

Modal’s pitch is aimed squarely at the mess around AI infrastructure: scarce GPUs, slow model loading, and too much manual wrangling. Its platform pulls computing capacity from more than 20 cloud providers into one network, lets developers run code without managing servers, and uses its own file system, container runtime, scheduler and networking to make that work. It doesn’t run data centres of its own. The sharpest growth is in Sandboxes, a product launched in 2023 for the wave of code-writing AI tools that need isolated places to execute.

That product is now a serious business in its own right. Modal says Sandboxes have reached a $300 million run rate, close to a third of the total, with nearly 3 billion sandboxes launched and room for 1 million running at once. Customers range from DoorDash and Ramp to Linear, Hebbia, Cognition and Runway, while Physical Intelligence, Generalist AI and 1X use it for robot training. Modal also says TypeSafe AI’s Jev pushed 1 trillion tokens through the platform in its first three days.

The funding comes as investors pile into AI infrastructure with very different bets on where value will sit. Gartner expects spending on AI-optimised infrastructure-as-a-service to reach $42 billion in 2026, with inference ahead of training. Modal’s own multiple is still high, but the company is betting that safe runtime for agents and code will matter more than plain GPU access. If that turns out to be right, Sandboxes may end up carrying more of the valuation than the rest of the cloud plumbing.