Modular recently announced that it has raised $100 million in a new round of funding led by General Catalyst and filled by existing investors GV (Google Ventures), SV Angel, Greylock, and Factory. This second funding round follows the company’s first $30 million round from last year and will enable the company to supercharge our vision for the future of AI infrastructure for the world’s developers.
Modular’s vision is to enable AI technology to be used by anyone, anywhere. And the company’s next-generation AI developer platform enables our customers and the world’s developers to defragment their AI technology stacks, pushing more innovations into production faster and realizing more value from their investment in AI.
The company’s products and technologies improve the nature of AI programmability, usability, scalability, compute efficiency, and hardware utilization. And the company’s infrastructure seamlessly integrates into our customers’ environments with minimal migration cost, natively supporting multiple clouds, multiple hardware accelerators, and multiple AI frameworks out of the box.
Modular’s community has grown to over 120K+ developers (including tens of thousands of enterprises) who are excited to utilize our AI infrastructure stack. And the company has built and delivered the world’s fastest unified AI engine that provides full compatibility with major AI frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch and delivers unparalleled performance and cost savings on today’s CPUs with support for GPUs coming in the fall.
The company also built Mojo, a programming language for all AI developers that is 35,000x faster than Python. And Mojo combines the usability of Python and the performance of C, bringing programmability back to AI and providing a common interface for the AI hardware landscape.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our conviction in Modular stems from the team’s impressive expertise, particularly the co-founders’ pivotal role in shaping the compilation landscape over the past two decades and fueling this new wave of AI through their work on TensorFlow. We believe in their ability to create the AI development platform of the future—one that (finally) allows technologists to fully realize the potential of their infrastructure while delivering a developer-friendly experience. The team’s commitment to tackling complex challenges from a technological and societal perspective aligns with our Responsible Innovation values, and we’re elated to support their efforts.”
— Deep Nishar, Managing Director at General Catalyst
“Modular is driving complexity out of the system to allow more people to participate, enable new kinds of full-stack innovation, and to get that research to production. We are thrilled and thankful to our partners, customers, developers, team and investors who are making this journey possible. This investment will allow us to continue building the best team in AI infrastructure, complete Mojo as a full superset of Python, and bring new capabilities to the AI engine as it scales out to the world later this year.”
— Chris Lattner, CEO and co-founder of Modular
