Modal Labs is nearing a $750 million funding round led by Accel at a $15.75 billion valuation, according to TechCrunch’s September 28 report. That valuation includes the new investment. TechCrunch cites a source familiar with the financing, and Modal declined to comment.
The deal would put the AI infrastructure provider’s valuation at 3.39 times the $4.65 billion it reached in its previous round just four months earlier. That round raised $355 million. The new financing remains a reported pending deal.
Investors are backing the companies that run models
Modal lets developers train models and run compute-heavy workloads without managing their own servers. Inference, running a trained model to produce an output, is a major part of the demand described in TechCrunch’s report, particularly among customers using open source models.
TechCrunch places the talks alongside other proposed inference investments. It cites Bloomberg’s report that Baseten is nearing financing at a $26 billion valuation, twice its June valuation. It also cites The Information’s reporting that Fireworks and Fal have discussed new rounds at higher valuations. These are fundraising reports with different levels of detail, rather than a set of completed deals.
Revenue growth helps explain the investor interest. TechCrunch says Modal had surpassed $300 million in annualized revenue as of May, a figure the company gave Reuters at the time. It also reports that Fireworks announced $1 billion in annualized revenue in July, five times its level a year earlier.
The cost of buying or leasing compute limits how much of that revenue these companies retain. TechCrunch describes thin margins across inference providers despite rapid revenue growth. Its report supplies neither an updated revenue figure for Modal nor a company-specific margin.
