AI Infrastructure Startup Modal Labs Raises $80 Million

Company Overview - The company provides a software layer that aggregates underlying physical infrastructure, including GPUs, to facilitate application development for training, inference, batch processing, and code execution [2] - The company positions itself as innovating in the software layer above the physical infrastructure, focusing on developer experience [5][11] - The company aims to be capital efficient by not owning the underlying physical infrastructure and running on top of existing clouds and neo-clouds [10][11] Funding and Investment - The company has raised over $80 million in additional funding, bringing the total to $111 million [6] - The funding will be used to hire engineers to build the platform and invest in sales and marketing [8] Market Opportunity and Customer Base - The company sees a massive market opportunity with exploding demand for its platform [8] - Customers include Medha, Lovable, Sue, Know Ramp, and Scale AI [2][12] - The company is seeing adoption from later-stage and enterprise companies moving research prototypes into production [7] - The company's customer base is primarily in the US, but is expanding globally [12][13] Technology and Infrastructure - The company's infrastructure is designed to support applications like generative media, large language models, and computational biotech [2][13] - The company's platform is used in various use cases, including curing cancer and weather forecasting [13] - The company differentiates itself from traditional infrastructure like AWS Lambda by building a new stack to support modern applications [3][4] Talent Acquisition - Finding talent to solve hard infrastructure problems is challenging [9]