Modal vs Neon

Modal Hits $1B ARR, Raises $750M Series D at $15.75B Valuation

Modal, an AI infrastructure startup, has achieved a $1 billion annualized run rate and raised a $750 million Series D at a $15.75 billion valuation, led by Accel. CEO Erik Bernhardsson noted that usage has tripled since the Series C and grown over 15x year-over-year. The company's Sandboxes product, launched in 2023, now generates $300 million in run rate (about a third of revenue), with nearly three billion spun up and scaling to a million concurrent. Modal aggregates demand from thousands of customers to offer elastic GPU capacity across nearly 25 cloud providers, moving away from fixed-term contracts and exploring NVIDIA alternatives. Key focuses include agentic workloads, GPU price declines, and future plans for training and batch products. CTO Akshat Bubna also emphasized the growing need for 'millions of concurrent sandboxes' and advanced infrastructure for AI agents.

• Modal raised a $750M Series D at a $15.75B valuation, led by Accel.
• Modal crossed $1B in annualized run rate.
• Usage has tripled since Series C and grown over 15x year-over-year.

Runtime recap: the full keynote, VM Sandboxes, Modal Clusters, and more.

Modal announces a runtime product update with VM Sandboxes and Modal Clusters, as highlighted in a blog post.

Modal Labs closing in on $750M round at $15.75B valuation

AI inference infrastructure provider Modal Labs is nearing a $750 million funding round led by Accel at a $15.75 billion valuation, according to a source. This would more than triple its valuation from $4.65 billion in May. The round comes amid surging demand for inference services, with other startups like Baseten, Fireworks, and Fal also raising at higher valuations. Modal Labs, founded in 2021 by Erik Bernhardsson and Akshat Bubna, provides infrastructure for training and running AI models without managing servers. The company has surpassed $300 million in annualized revenue as of May. The funding talks follow a security incident in July where a customer's data was compromised, but Modal's platform was not breached.

• Modal Labs is nearing a $750 million funding round led by Accel at a $15.75 billion valuation.
• The round would more than triple Modal Labs' valuation from $4.65 billion in May.
• Modal Labs has surpassed $300 million in annualized revenue as of May.

Databricks Powers Agentic Future with $7B Run Rate

Databricks, the data and AI company, has revealed it has surpassed a $7 billion revenue run rate, growing 80% year-over-year, and is valued at $190 billion. The company, which began as a Spark-based data processing platform, has evolved through multiple technology S-curves—Spark, Lakehouse, Lakebase, and now AI agents. Databricks' Lakehouse architecture unifies data lakes and warehouses, while its new Lakebase product, built on the acquisition of Neon, brings operational databases onto the same lakehouse foundation. The company is positioning itself as the 'system of record for agents,' with tools like Genie and Agent Bricks enabling employees to build and manage AI agents. With over 17 million databases launched by agents daily, Databricks is betting on the rise of agentic automation transforming the nature of work and the structure of firms, shifting from managerial hierarchy to human-agent collaboration.

• Databricks surpassed $7 billion revenue run rate, growing 80% year-over-year.
• Databricks is valued at $190 billion.
• More than 17 million databases are launched by AI agents on Databricks every day.

Major update to our Free Plan: now with 1 GB of Postgres storage per project, 100 projects included

Database storage on the Neon Free plan is now 1 GB per project, up from 0.5 GB. You still get 100 projects, with existing projects getting the new limit automatically.

Claimable Neon: Provisioned by agents, claimed by humans

Claimable Neon implements the anonymous registration method in auth.md, the open agent registration protocol authored by WorkOS, to give agents a way to provision a temporary Neon project without creating an account or collecting payment details.