New York-headquartered AI startup Modal Labs to open London office

US AI infrastructure startup Modal Labs is opening a London office, marking the latest North American AI firm to invest in bricks and mortar in London or up their presence in the capital. New York–headquartered Modal provides computing infrastructure for AI workloads, with a focus on AI inference, the process of running an AI model, as opposed to training an AI model. The startup, founded in 2021, is opening an office in the Marble Arch area of London, sources say. The space can hold up to 40 workers, and Modal plans to have all its London staff in place by early September, sources say. Modal is joining several North American AI firms which have recently announced new London office openings or expansions, including AI giants OpenAI and Anthropic, and AI startups Cursor and Cohere. In May, Modal raised $355m in a new round of financing, valuing the company at $4.65bn, in a round led by Redpoint Ventures and General Catalyst, up from its $1.1bn valuation eight months before. Modal, which has offices in New York, San Francisco and Sweden and employs around 170 people, was also recently in the news when it was revealed that the OpenAI rogue agent hacked Modal, as well as Hugging Face. Modal was co-founded by CEO Erik Bernhardsson, who previously ran the tech team at mortgage tech firm Better.com and also spent six years at Spotify, where he was central to building its music recommendation engine. Its other co-founder is Akshat Bubna, who serves as chief technology officer, who was previously an engineer at Scale AI, the US AI infrastructure startup. Bernhardsson says: "Modal has been transatlantic since day one: New York, San Francisco, Stockholm. We’re doubling down with our new London office as part of our commitment to helping European companies achieve scale.” Would you like to write the first comment? Login to post comments