Modal is the AI-native cloud provider that just crossed a $1B revenue run rate and raised $750M at $15.75B. Back in 2024, CEO @bernhardsson revealed how they threw out traditional infrastructure and built @modal from scratch for AI: “I spent seven years at Spotify building the music recommendation system. And I realized 90% of the work is building infrastructure, not the application. So what’s broken? First, traditional infrastructure isn’t built for fast feedback loops. When you’re building AI applications, it’s annoying to test locally and then deploy to production. But you can split it into two environments. A local environment you test in. And a cloud environment you deploy into. But then you replace it with a different problem. Going from one environment to the other. This isn’t as much of a problem in traditional application development. A lot of infrastructure is pretty good at mocking the cloud when you develop locally. But it gets really hard when you have GPUs and very large models. The initialization step is very complex. You need to load all these models into GPUs. Originally, I thought about it as developer experience and fast feedback loops. I wanted to write code, hit enter, and run it in the cloud immediately. It turns out that’s also really good for running applications in the cloud. It lets you scale up and down very fast. Then third, there’s something you have in AI that you don’t have in backend land. GPU capacity problems. Now you have to run multi-region. You need to aggregate capacity from all these different places. And no region and no cloud provider has enough capacity to handle this dynamic, flexible scaling. And most of our workloads are inference. So a lot of things break with traditional backend infrastructure. That’s why we decided to start over and build our own.” Full episode here: