Modal raises $750 million at a $15.75 billion valuation after passing $1 billion in run rate

Modal, the serverless AI infrastructure company, said on Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2026, that it raised a $750 million Series D at a $15.75 billion post-money valuation, led by Accel with Kleiner Perkins joining. CEO Erik Bernhardsson said Modal recently crossed $1 billion in annualized run rate, with usage tripling since its Series C five months ago.

The AI boom's loudest money goes to model labs and chip makers. Modal is the quieter bet in between: rent GPUs by the second, spin up a sandbox for an agent's code, tear it down, bill it. A $300 million business that exists because LLMs now write code that has to run somewhere is the most 2026 sentence imaginable. Run rate is not profit, and serverless GPU is a crowded lane — but tripling usage in five months says the agents are real enough to need a place to live.

Modal raised a $750 million Series D at a $15.75 billion post-money valuation. A Series D is a later round of venture funding, after earlier money. Post-money valuation is the price this round puts on the whole company after the new cash is in. Accel led. Kleiner Perkins joined. All existing investors participated, including Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, Redpoint, Lux Capital, Amplify Partners and Bain Capital Ventures. Those lines are Modal's.

Modal recently crossed $1 billion in annualized run rate. Run rate, here, is the current pace of sales stretched out to a year. It is not profit, and it is not a closed-year revenue number. Since its Series C five months ago, usage has tripled. The company says it has grown more than 15 times year over year. Axios reported total funding of about $1.2 billion. The run-rate, usage and 15-times lines are Modal's. The $1.2 billion total is Axios's.

Sandboxes — isolated environments for coding agents, reinforcement-learning rollouts and untrusted code — launched in 2023 and is now a $300 million run-rate product on its own. A sandbox is the closed box where an agent's code runs, then gets torn down. Reinforcement learning, here, is training a model by letting it try, fail and try again. Modal says it has spun up close to 3 billion sandboxes, and that they scale to a million running at once. Those lines are Modal's.

Modal built its own file system, container runtime, scheduler and networking on a capacity pool spanning more than 20 clouds. A container runtime is the software that starts and stops the boxes the code runs in. A scheduler decides which machine takes the next job. Those lines are Modal's.

Named users in the post: TypeSafe AI's Jev, which Modal says served 1 trillion tokens on Modal in its first three days; DoorDash's AI platform team; Cognition; Ramp; Linear; Hebbia; Runway; Physical Intelligence; Generalist AI; 1X; Chai Discovery; Achira; and Suno. A token is a small piece of text a model reads or writes. Those names are Modal's.

Recent launches, as Modal lists them: multi-node training — one short code label that spins up a fast linked cluster, with no need to reserve capacity in advance; Modal servers for HTTP, the basic web request protocol; LLM-serving features such as Endpoint Candidates; and generally available virtual machines in Sandboxes, meaning anyone can use them now. The company says it is moving into reinforcement-learning and post-training products. Post-training is the extra teaching after a model is first built. Those lines are Modal's.

Modal has a team of more than 200 people across New York, San Francisco and Stockholm. That headcount is Modal's.

The picture is Modal co-founder and CEO Erik Bernhardsson in glasses and a gray striped button-down shirt, against a light gray backdrop. It is the company's official portrait from the Series D announcement. The frame does not print a calendar date.

In plain terms, Modal said on Wednesday that it raised $750 million at a $15.75 billion valuation, led by Accel, after crossing $1 billion in annualized run rate. Usage has tripled since its Series C five months ago. The sandbox product alone is a $300 million run-rate business. Axios puts lifetime funding around $1.2 billion. Run rate is not profit.