The funding round, led by private equity firm General Catalyst along with participation from existing investors, including SV Angel, Google Ventures, Factory, and Greylock, will support Modular in advancing its vision for the future of AI infrastructure for developers
Modular raises $100m in new funding round led by General Catalyst. (Credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)
Modular, a next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) developer platform, has raised $100m in a new funding round to fix AI infrastructure for developers.
Led by private equity company General Catalyst, the funding round also had the participation of existing investors SV Angel, Google Ventures (GV), Factory, and Greylock.
General Catalyst managing director Deep Nishar said: “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.”
The second round of financing comes after the AI developer platform’s first $30m round in 2022.
Modular intends to utilise the newly raised capital to advance its vision for the future of AI infrastructure for developers worldwide.
Founded in 2022, the company is an integrated, composable suite of tools to streamline AI infrastructure for clients, supporting them to develop, deploy, and innovate faster.
The AI start-up offers products and technologies designed to enhance the nature of AI programmability, usability, scalability, compute efficiency, and utilisation of hardware.
Besides, its infrastructure will easily and cost-effectively integrate into customers’ environments, supporting multiple clouds, hardware accelerators, and AI frameworks, said the company.
Modular stated: “We are attacking the complexity that slows AI development today by solving the fragmentation issues that plague the AI stack, starting with where AI software meets AI hardware.”
The company has also built a programming language, dubbed Mojo, for AI developers,
Mojo, which is claimed to be 35,000x faster than Python, combines the usability of Python and the performance of C to bring programmability back to AI.
Furthermore, it delivers a common interface for the AI hardware landscape.
Modular has also announced that it plans to provide the ability to download Mojo and a whole developer toolset locally to desktop machines in early September 2023.