Modal, a five-year-old startup that rents out Nvidia GPUs and software to help developers run and train models and AI agents, is in talks to raise $150M to $250M at around a $4.5B valuation, an 80% premium to its last round just a few months ago. Annualized revenue jumped about 5x from last fall to roughly $300M, driven largely by demand for Modal's sandboxes, isolated software environments where developers can run AI agents and code without affecting the rest of their computer or code base, used by customers including Ramp and Lovable. Accel and existing investor Redpoint Ventures are in talks to invest, joining prior backers General Catalyst, Lux Capital, and Amplify Partners that have put in more than $111M to date, though margins could get squeezed as scarce GPU supply and surging spot prices from major AI developers drive up Modal's costs of leasing chips from cloud providers.
