Modal Labs Raises $16 Million in Quest to Enable Coding in the Cloud

Erik Bernhardsson

New York-based Modal Labs, which is building IT infrastructure that will help developers run code in the cloud, has raised $16 million in Series A funding led by Silicon Valley firm Redpoint Ventures. Other investors included West Coast firm Amplify Partners, New York’s Lux Capital and Definition Capital, and over a dozen angel investors. In 2022, Modal Labs raised $7 million in a seed round.

Former Spotify engineer Erik Bernhardsson founded Modal with the “idea that we should make it easier for data teams to run things in the cloud.” Toward this end, Modal addressed a fundamental question: How do you take code from a user’s computer, stick it in a container, and launch it in the cloud within a couple of seconds?

From the Ground Up

“Once we looked into this, we realized we would have to build almost all of it ourselves — so we started hacking on low-level things like building our own file system, despite most people telling us we were crazy,” Modal said in a statement announcing the general availability of its platform, “meaning anyone can sign up and get started running code in the cloud in a few minutes.”

In an interview with TechCrunch, Bernhardsson said the suite of tools that data teams currently rely on are fragmented, tedious to use, and ultimately, lead to higher costs. In contrast, “Modal serves the startups building applications in this space by allowing them to run code in the cloud, without the hassle of managing their own infrastructure,” he added.

Google Colab a Threat
Modal says some of its users are already running production environments — “some at very large scale” — on its platform. Power use cases range from generative artificial intelligence, computational biotech and code execution. The company’s customers include Ramp, a provider of expense management and financial tools, and content platform Substack.