The Compute 100

Erik Bernhardsson, CEO of Modal

The Compute 100

Show Notes

Today's guest is Erik Bernhardsson. Erik is the founder and CEO of Modal, NYC-based Series C infrastructure startup, most recently valued at $4.65B, up from their Series B at $1.1B. Modal was founded in 2021, in a pre-ChatGPT world, built to ease developer friction around deploying and running ML models at scale. The early product was inspired by Erik's time at Spotify where he built their music recommender system. Since then, Modal has become a go-to solution for developers who want fast inference across LLMs and agents. Modal is growing rapidly, hitting nearly $300M in revenue, driven by demand for their sandboxes product, which let AI agents run in isolated environments. We're thrilled to have Erik on the podcast.

The Compute 100 is led by Brian Schechter and Gaby Lorenzi, compute-focused investors at Primary. Primary is a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building across markets including compute, industrials, healthcare and vertical AI. With $1.6B AUM and a 60+ person operating team, Primary delivers unparalleled support to teams across recruiting, finance, GTM, and brand. Primary’s compute portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, Haiqu, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).

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