Modal raises 750 million dollars in Series D funding at 15.75 billion dollar valuation

Modal Labs, an artificial intelligence infrastructure provider, announced that the company raised 750 million dollars in a Series D funding round. Accel led the round with participation from Kleiner Perkins and other previous investors. The company's valuation now stands at 15.75 billion dollars, which is more than three times the valuation after the previous funding round in May. The revenue growth reflects the rapid expansion of Modal, with the company reporting annual revenue exceeding one billion dollars since the May funding round. Nearly one third of Modal's revenue comes from Sandboxes, a cloud service with containers customized for AI workloads. Developers can use these containers as environments for training models. The service also supports running AI agents and code created by agents. Modal states that Sandboxes can prepare tens of thousands of containers per second. This scalability is made possible by a specifically built infrastructure management system or scheduler. The scheduler processes container preparation requests in parallel across multiple servers to accelerate work.

Modal claims the company can run up to one million containers simultaneously in internal tests conducted recently. Sandboxes that host AI agents sometimes connect to a second set of containers or Sidecars that install supplementary software. For example, a tool that detects and screens for hallucination symptoms may run. Modal states that Sandboxes will run Sidecars on the same physical server as the containers they support to reduce data transmission latency. Some agent types require the ability to access external applications. According to Modal, the Sandboxes feature called Secret Injection allows agents to use application credentials without seeing the data. This access restriction helps protect credentials from unwanted agents and cyber attacks. Modal offers Sandboxes alongside a cloud service customized for AI training loads. This allows developers to activate GPU clusters with relatively simple scripts. Chips in Modal's clusters exchange data using RDMA, a network protocol that accelerates data transfer by reducing the path packages travel.