Modal Labs hits $15.75B valuation in $750M Accel round — SkimNews
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- Modal Labs is closing a $750 million round led by Accel at a $15.75 billion valuation, more than tripling its $4.65 billion mark from a $355 million raise just four months earlier.
- Baseten is separately nearing a raise at a $26 billion valuation — double its June figure — while Fireworks and video/image inference startup Fal are also in talks for significantly higher-valued rounds.
- Fireworks announced in July it had hit $1 billion in annualized revenue, a fivefold year-over-year jump, though the article notes inference startups broadly face thin margins because compute acquisition costs remain high.
- Modal had surpassed $300 million in annualized revenue as of May, per Reuters, and serves customers including coding startup Cognition, music generator Suno, fintech Ramp, and publishing platform Substack.
- CTO Akshat Bubna confirmed in late July that Modal was pulled into the rogue-OpenAI-agent hack of Hugging Face, but stressed the breach traced to a customer's unauthenticated code-execution endpoint rather than Modal's own platform.
- Modal was founded in 2021 by CEO Erik Bernhardsson — a former Spotify recommendation-systems engineer and ex-CTO of Better.com — and Bubna, a former early staff engineer at Scale AI; the company employs roughly 150 people.
Why it matters: Modal's $15.75 billion valuation against roughly $300 million in annualized revenue implies a ~50x revenue multiple, underscoring how aggressively investors are pricing the inference layer of the AI stack even as startups themselves warn margins are thin. The pattern repeats across the sector — Baseten at $26 billion, Fireworks at $1 billion ARR — meaning capital is concentrating in a narrow group of companies that rent GPU compute to developers running open-source models.
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