New York-headquartered AI startup Modal Labs to open London office

Modal Labs is setting up shop in London's Marble Arch, with room for 40 people and a target of having its UK team in place by early September. The New York-headquartered company builds infrastructure for AI inference — the unglamorous but increasingly lucrative business of actually running trained models rather than building them — and it's been growing fast enough to justify the expansion.

The timing tracks with a broader pattern. OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor and Cohere have all either opened or expanded London offices in recent months, turning the city into something like the default European outpost for American AI companies. Whether that's about talent, time zones, or just following each other's lead is hard to say, but Modal joining the list makes it four heavyweight names in a fairly short stretch.

Modal's own trajectory has been steep. Founded in 2021 by Erik Bernhardsson and Akshat Bubna, the company raised $355 million in May at a $4.65 billion valuation — up from $1.1 billion just eight months earlier. That's the kind of valuation jump that tends to draw attention, and not always the good kind: Modal was also caught up in a security incident earlier this year when a rogue AI agent tied to OpenAI broke into its systems, along with Hugging Face's.

Bernhardsson, who previously worked on recommendation systems at Spotify and ran engineering at Better.com, frames the London move as part of a long-standing transatlantic identity rather than a new strategy — the company already has offices in New York, San Francisco and Sweden, with around 170 employees total. Bubna, a former Scale AI engineer, rounds out the founding team. The stated goal is helping European companies scale their AI workloads, though given how crowded London's AI-infrastructure scene is getting, Modal will have plenty of company doing exactly that.