Factory is now available on Anthropic's Claude Marketplace, letting enterprise customers apply their committed Anthropic spend toward Factory without a separate buying cycle. Factory automates the software development lifecycle, covering planning, implementation, testing and security, and supports multiple enterprise deployment models. Its customers include NVIDIA, Adyen and Ernst & Young.
Markov Robotics is training a world model for zero-shot general-purpose robot dexterity, using fewer than ten hours of robot data where comparable results typically need thousands of hours. The company runs nearly all its compute on Modal, from preprocessing hundreds of terabytes of video to 2–10 concurrent training runs and remote inference via Modal Tunnels at roughly 20 milliseconds round-trip latency. Preprocessing that could take a full day completes in twenty to thirty minutes, with fan-out to upwards of 500 GPUs at once.
Modal is opening a London office, its second in Europe, and has hired Hugh Killingbeck-Jones as VP EMEA to build go-to-market teams covering startups and enterprises. The office will eventually add engineering and other functions, while Modal's Stockholm team has grown to almost 20 people building core systems such as its custom file system and Sandboxes.
VapiCon 2026, the voice AI summit hosted by Vapi, expands to two days on November 11 and 12 at the Festival Pavilion at Fort Mason, with plans for 1,200+ attendees, 50+ speakers, and 20+ sponsors. The first edition drew more than 850 people in San Francisco on October 2, 2025, and tickets for 2026 are on sale now.
Vapi has hired Nathalie Criou as its VP of Product, a few months after she joined the voice AI startup. Criou previously held product and general management roles at Google, VMware, Amazon, Twilio and Docker, and founded and sold the startup RidePal. She said she joined because voice is an underused channel that AI can now transform, citing customer Kavak reorganizing around voice within six months.
Modal said its platform and isolation were not compromised in the Hugging Face agent intrusion, which used Modal as a third-party launchpad. The affected environment was a customer application deployed to a publicly accessible endpoint without authentication that executed internet-submitted code inside a Modal Sandbox, and the code execution stayed within that customer's own container. Modal noted unauthenticated Sandbox exposure is never the default and recommended authentication, IP allowlists and restricted outbound network access.
Vapi has named Jayson Noland, who spent over a decade in tech finance and helped take Cloudflare public and past $1 billion in revenue, as its Chief Financial Officer. Noland joins at the Series B stage to build out the finance function, from scalable systems to capital allocation, citing voice agents as the next major human-machine interface.
The Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab has celebrated its class of 2026 Ph.D. graduates, whose work spans robotics, large language models and reasoning, computer vision, generative modeling, AI safety, and AI for science and healthcare. Graduates are heading to faculty and postdoctoral positions, industry research labs, and startups of their own founding, including roles at Physical Intelligence, OpenAI, Mistral AI, Amazon, and Princeton CITP.
Vapi is pitching its voice AI platform as a way for brands to turn the contact center from a cost center into a competitive advantage, citing Amazon Ring, which evaluated over 40 voice AI vendors before going live on Vapi in two weeks and now runs 100% of its inbound CX volume through it, with improved CSAT scores. Vapi argues packaged voice solutions lock brands into vendor-controlled models and generic voices, while building from scratch is slow and costly, and it touts sub-second response times, VPC-resident architecture with zero data retention and PII scrubbing, and deployments that go live in days.
Modal raised $355 million at a $4.65B post-money valuation in a round led by General Catalyst and Redpoint, with Menlo, Bain Capital Ventures and Accel joining as new investors. The company says it has grown fivefold since September and surpassed $300 million in annualized revenue, with more than 1 billion sandboxes launched on the platform and sandboxes now driving over a third of revenue. Modal plans to expand low-latency inference, close the training and inference loop for reinforcement learning, and add granular RBAC so customers can give agents capabilities without risk.
Applied Compute trains custom enterprise AI agents via reinforcement learning, building on Modal's sandboxes, Functions and sub-second cold starts to keep thousands of parallel rollouts GPU-bound. Its agents include a merchant onboarding model for DoorDash and a bug-catching agent for Cognition.
Vapi announced a $50M Series B led by Peak XV, with YC, M12, Kleiner Perkins and earlier investors participating, bringing total funding to $72M. The round follows a year in which Vapi's enterprise revenue grew 10x and its voice agents crossed 1,000,000,000 calls handled. Vapi says Amazon Ring moved from evaluation to running 100% of inbound calls on its platform in two weeks, with CSAT rising.
Google Cloud named Replit its 2026 AI Tooling Partner of the Year, recognizing the platform now used by more than 50 million people across 85% of the Fortune 500. The award follows the launch of Replit's Agent 4, which the company says is 10x faster than Agent 3 and runs multiple agents in parallel. Replit is available on the Google Cloud Marketplace, integrated with Cloud Run, Kubernetes Engine, and BigQuery.
Modal has acquired Butter, with founder Erik Dunteman and researcher Raymond Tana joining Modal's Sandbox team. The Butter team brings agent harness engineering experience, including bVisor, a virtual Linux kernel written from scratch in Zig for lightweight, ephemeral sandboxes. Modal says the hire advances its goal of making Modal Sandboxes a best-in-class product experience.
Physical Intelligence (Pi) runs its Visual-Language-Action robot models on Modal, adding only ~10-15ms of network overhead. Pi worked with Modal to build a QUIC-based portal over UDP with automatic NAT traversal, replacing TCP Tunnels to avoid request-response stalls in the robot control loop. Checkpoints stored in Modal Volumes load in under 30 seconds, and region-pinned deployments keep inference close to robots.
Runway is partnering with Modal to power real-time inference for Runway Characters, a real-time video agent API built on Runway's GWM-1 world model that generates expressive digital personas from a single image with zero fine-tuning. Modal's serverless platform let Runway move from proof of concept to production in under 30 days, using single-line multi-node GPU clusters with RDMA networking across every region. Characters is available now to developers and businesses at dev.runwayml.com and to consumers at runwayml.com.
Modal, a cloud infrastructure platform for data- and compute-intensive AI workloads, highlights research from Hazy Research, Scaling Intelligence, and IRIS that used its GPU fleet to speed up AI research. The KernelBench project, led by Scaling Intelligence's Anne Ouyang, Simon Guo, and Will Hu, provides a 250-problem benchmark and research environment for automated GPU kernel generation, using Modal for consistent, scalable benchmarking across hardware from L40s to Blackwell systems.
Chai Discovery is using Modal to run its machine learning drug discovery pipelines, from protein embeddings and multiple sequence alignments to antibody design. Modal Volumes downloads and indexes datasets reaching hundreds of gigabytes once, then shares them across machines, while elastic GPU scaling spins up hundreds of GPUs in minutes. Chai says the same setup now carries research workflows into production without rewriting infrastructure.
Modal has raised more than $80M in a Series B round led by Lux Capital, bringing its post-money valuation to $1.1B and total funding to $111M. The AI infrastructure provider offers Inference, Sandboxes, Batch and Training products, with sub-second container startup times and usage-based serverless pricing. Meta used Modal to spin up thousands of concurrent sandboxed environments for reinforcement learning with its Code World Models.
Justin Dignelli has joined Modal as VP of Sales, after advising the AI compute platform on its next stage of growth and investing in its Series A. Modal is already generating high eight figures in revenue across thousands of customers, and Dignelli plans to build a GTM organization to scale it further.
Jamsocket, the backend platform behind the open-source orchestrator Plane, Y-Sweet and ForeverVM, is joining Modal, with co-founders Paul Butler and Taylor Baldwin joining the Modal team. Jamsocket products will keep operating normally while core functionality is migrated to Modal, which the founders say lets AI-centric customers deploy GPU inference, code sandboxes and real-time backends from one platform.
Lovable used Modal Sandboxes to run LLM-generated code during a June 2025 promotional weekend with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, enabling users to build an estimated 250,000 applications in 48 hours. Modal ran over 1 million sandboxes with up to 20,000 concurrent at peak as Lovable's concurrent sessions surged 2.5-3x, and its platform team was not paged once. Lovable cut its sandbox orchestration code from 15,000 lines to 700 lines after switching to Modal.
Modal announced that Twirl, a data orchestrator for developing, testing and deploying data pipelines, is joining the company. Twirl co-founders Rebecka Storm and Eric Hansander will join Modal's Stockholm office, where they will develop and expand Modal's serverless infrastructure and grow its European footprint. Modal said the team's data product experience will help it expand beyond AI inference into adjacent AI, ML and data use cases.
Modal has unveiled a redesigned logo and wordmark alongside its first out-of-home brand campaign, with three billboards running across San Francisco until the end of May. The new logo, developed with Ty Wilkins, replaces the thin-lined cube "M" to stay legible from favicons to billboards. The campaign highlights Modal as an AI infrastructure platform, and the NYC-based company chose SF to reach the tech and AI epicenter.
Modal held an internal hackathon where 30 employees formed 13 teams to build projects that all used Modal. Browserman is a multi-modal AI agent built with Llama-3.2-90B-Vision-Instruct-FP8, vLLM and Playwright that navigates the web visually to complete tasks. Glodal prototyped a distributed control plane that cut request latency from 268ms to 3ms, and Modal is now working to build it into the platform.
A top-tier European soccer team, anonymized as AFC Richmond, moved its match tracking data pipeline to Modal's serverless GPU platform and cut the cost of processing a full season of games by 50%. The team runs inference on ~3.5 million tracking observations per game through a custom transformer-based model, and with Airflow on Modal now processes each game's data in minutes rather than hours.
Modal signed a Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS to help businesses develop and deploy AI products faster on its serverless platform for GPU-accelerated workloads, which can spin up GPU-enabled containers in as little as one second. As part of the deal, Modal will list on AWS Marketplace and invest in integrations such as AWS PrivateLink to serve customers with specific security and privacy requirements.
Cursor announced that Supermaven, the fast context-aware AI coding assistant, is joining the company, with Supermaven creator Jacob Jackson and his team coming aboard. Cursor said it plans a new Tab model version that is fast, context-aware and especially good at handling long chains of large edits, while the Supermaven plugin will keep being maintained even as Cursor becomes the team's core focus.
Tidbyt, the NYC-based maker of programmable smart home LED screens, is joining Modal. Tidbyt co-founders Rohan Singh and Mats Linander, who previously worked on container infrastructure at Spotify, bring large-scale systems experience to Modal's cloud infrastructure for data/AI/ML teams. Tidbyt's service will keep running for existing devices, but no new devices will ship.
Modal now supports HIPAA-compliant workloads, available to Enterprise plan customers who sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) via security@modal.com. All Modal features fall within the BAA's scope except Volumes, Images (excluding Filesystem and Directory Snapshots), Memory Snapshots, and user code, where PHI should not be placed. Modal cites its least-privilege data handling and gVisor sandboxing runtime as security foundations, building on its SOC 2 Type 1 announcement and ongoing SOC 2 Type 2 certification.
Cursor raised a $60M Series A from Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Jeff Dean, Noam Brown, and founders of Stripe, GitHub, Ramp, Perplexity and OpenAI. The AI coding tool says it has grown to more than 40,000 users, including startups, research institutions and large enterprises, and describes internal systems for next-edit prediction, retrieval across billions of files and speculative-inference code rewriting.
Why it matters: Cursor's $60M Series A announcement also discloses its user base has grown past 40,000 and names the investors backing its AI coding tool.
Basis organized the Prompt Olympics, a competitive programming-style prompt engineering contest with a $5,000 prize, and ran it on Modal's infrastructure. In one challenge, participants wrote prompts that steered LLaMA 3 70B, deployed on Modal, to generate code that had to pass tests inside Modal Sandboxes. The finale had players prompt a model to control the Crafter game agent; Basis found even capable open source models like LLaMA 3 70B hard to prompt effectively and switched to a proprietary model API for that component.
Substack has moved training and deployment for nearly all of its ML models—including spam detection, newsletter recommendations, audio transcription, sentiment analysis and image generation—from AWS SageMaker to Modal. Head of AI & ML Engineering Mike Cohen cited SageMaker's convoluted developer experience, hard-to-share code across notebooks and 5+ minute container startup times; on Modal, an inference endpoint took an hour to implement. Substack now runs a full fine-tune, validation and deployment workflow on Modal's storage primitives.
Modal, the serverless platform for AI and data teams, has been named to Wing's sixth annual Enterprise Tech 30 list, ranking No. 3 among ten companies in the early-stage category. The list was selected from nearly 600 venture-backed private enterprise tech companies by 112 venture capitalists and 36 corporate development teams.
Suno used Modal to scale inference and batch pre-processing across thousands of GPUs, bringing its music generation model to market four months early instead of hiring engineers to build and maintain infrastructure. The team ran batch pre-processing with a few short Python scripts and no config files, then expanded to model deployment with HTTP-exposed functions and chained inference across multiple models and containers. Modal's auto-scaling to thousands of GPUs handled holiday demand spikes without long-term GPU reservations.
Modal announced that its cloud function platform is now generally available, letting anyone sign up and run Python code in the cloud within minutes, after opening a waitlist in 2022. The platform offers serverless execution billed per second, autoscaling GPU inference endpoints on A100, A10G, T4, L4 and H100, and large-scale batch jobs across thousands of containers with no YAML configuration. Modal also raised a $16M Series A led by Redpoint Ventures, with Amplify Partners, which led the seed round, and plans to use the capital to accelerate its product roadmap.
Modal Labs has raised a $16 million Series A led by Redpoint Ventures, with existing investor Amplify Partners and new participants including Lux Capital and Definition Capital, bringing total funding to $23 million. The company also officially launched its cloud platform, previously in beta with early customers such as Ramp, Substack and SphinxBio, and will use the funds to accelerate product development and hire engineers at its New York City headquarters.