Modal raises $750M Series D at a $15.75B valuation as annualised revenue tops $1B

TLDR

• Modal raised a $750 million Series D at a $15.75 billion post-money valuation, led by Accel.¹²
• The valuation is more than triple May's $4.65 billion, as investors pay up for the layer that runs AI models.³⁴
• Annualised revenue has crossed $1 billion.³⁴

Modal, which rents GPU capacity and runs code for AI developers, announced on 14 October that it raised a $750 million Series D at a $15.75 billion post-money valuation, according to its own blog post.¹ Accel led the round and Kleiner Perkins joined, with all existing investors taking part, including Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, Redpoint, Lux Capital, Amplify Partners and Bain Capital Ventures.¹ Chief executive Erik Bernhardsson told Axios Pro exclusively that the New York-based company has topped $1 billion in annualised run rate.²

The jump is steep. Modal raised $355 million at $4.65 billion in May, so the valuation has more than tripled in five months, and Bernhardsson wrote that usage has tripled over the same period and the business has grown more than 15 times year over year.³¹ Modal says it built its own file system, container runtime and scheduler instead of relying on the standard cloud stack, and draws capacity from more than 20 cloud providers.¹³

The product driving much of the growth is Sandboxes, which Modal launched in 2023 after noticing that people were using large language models to generate code that needed somewhere safe to run. The company says it has reached a $300 million run rate, has started close to 3 billion sandboxes and can scale to a million running at once.¹ SiliconANGLE notes that Sandboxes accounts for nearly a third of Modal's revenue and that Modal ran 1 million concurrent containers in a recent internal test.⁴ Customers named by Modal include DoorDash, Ramp, Linear, Cognition and Runway, while robotics firms such as Physical Intelligence and 1X use it for training.¹³ Fresh capital will go partly towards new reinforcement-learning and post-training products, SiliconANGLE reported.⁴

For Accel, the round extends a heavy bet on AI infrastructure and tooling. In April the firm raised $5 billion, made up of a $4 billion Leaders Fund V and a $650 million sidecar, to write average cheques of about $200 million into late-stage AI companies; its portfolio there includes Anthropic, the AI code editor Cursor and the frontend deployment platform Vercel.⁵ Axios Pro framed the deal as part of a broader surge: valuations for AI-specific serverless cloud platforms such as Modal and Baseten are rocketing as companies look to secure compute.²

Why it matters: a compute-rental startup that was valued at under $5 billion five months ago now commands $15.75 billion, a sign that late-stage investors are paying up for the layer that lets AI agents and models actually run, not only for the model builders themselves.