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Erik Bernhardsson

Co-founder & CEO, Modal

Search every verified Erik Bernhardsson interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Erik Bernhardsson, co-founder and CEO of AI infrastructure company Modal, appeared on Bloomberg Tech in October 2026 to discuss the company's $750 million Series D raise, which brought its post-money valuation to $15.75 billion. He said Modal has seen demand from a range of companies building AI applications and described the current period as a "new era of software" requiring new infrastructure building blocks. He cited more than 3 billion sandboxes run for customers and discussed the company's launch of VM Sandboxes, which provide full Linux environments for AI agents to execute code, with plans to add Windows and Mac support. He also noted growing demand for inference and reinforcement learning workloads. At Modal's Runtime 2026 product launch in October, Bernhardsson announced new features including Endpoint Candidates for testing serving configurations in production, Modal Clusters for multi-node training with RDMA, VM Sandboxes, and Sandbox Sidecars for low-latency harnesses and secrets injection. In earlier interviews, he discussed Modal's revenue growth, saying the company was approaching $1 billion in annual revenue and that he expected it to potentially exceed $1.5 billion by the end of the year. He also commented on capital efficiency, stating that investors currently favor larger raises over capital-efficient growth, and shared views on European tech, advocating that European companies should aim for global markets from the start.

Recent appearances

  • AI Boom Drives ASML Higher as Nvidia Bets on Europe

    October 14, 2026 · 📺 Bloomberg Tech

    Bloomberg’s Ed Ludlow breaks down ASML's earnings after the company raised its sales forecast for 2026 and said it aims to increase production of its chip-making machines to keep up with soaring AI spending. Plus, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announces plans to invest an additional $2 billion in European deals. And, an inside look at the making of Grand Theft Auto VI, expected to be the biggest video game blockbuster of all time. 00:00:00 - Bloomberg Tech Begins 00:00:52 - Sarah Jacobs, Bloomberg News 00:04:12 - Antonella Frongillo, Intesa Sanpaolo 00:12:42 - Ian King, Bloomberg News 00:19:24 - Ra…

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  • Modal CEO: AI Has Entered a ‘New Era of Software’

    October 14, 2026 · 📺 Bloomberg Tech

    AI cloud startup Modal has raised $750 million at a $15.75 billion post-money valuation as demand surges for the infrastructure needed to build and run AI applications. CEO Erik Bernhardsson discusses the company’s more than 3 billion AI sandboxes, growing demand for inference and reinforcement learning, and why increasingly capable agents will need secure virtual environments where they can execute code and eventually take on longer-running tasks. He joins Ed Ludlow on "Bloomberg Tech." -------- Like this video? Subscribe to Bloomberg Tech on YouTube:    / @bloombergtech     Watch the latest…

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  • Runtime 2026 Product Launch Keynote | Erik Bernhardsson, CEO @ Modal

    October 05, 2026 · 📺 Modal

    Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson opens Runtime 2026 in San Francisco with a look at why every platform shift needs new infrastructure, announcing a wave of launches across inference, training and sandboxes. New features include: – Endpoint Candidates: test serving configs in production and promote the winners – Modal Clusters: multi-node training with RDMA in one line of code – VM Sandboxes: full Linux environments for agents – Sandbox Sidecars: low-latency harnesses and secrets injection next to your sandboxes

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  • Modal's Erik Bernhardsson: Making AI Infrastructure Feel Local

    September 03, 2026 · 📺 General Catalyst

    General Catalyst's Max Rimpel sits down with Modal's Erik Bernhardsson to talk about the ambition for a new cloud, solving compute-intensive problems, and building before product-market fit. Chapters 00:00:00 — Learning to Code on a Mac Plus 00:04:38 — Building the Engine Behind Spotify’s Discover Weekly 00:09:17 — The Pandemic Project That Became Modal 00:10:14 — The 1 to 2 Year Rule for Picking Startup Problems 00:12:36 — Broke Until Stable Diffusion Hit 00:15:42 — Architecting a New Cloud for AI 00:17:41 — Agents Want the Same Things Developers Do Learn more at https://modal.com/ Follow M…

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  • Modal powers cloud infrastructure for AI: Erik Bernhardsson, CEO of Modal

    September 02, 2026 · 📺 Scaling-Europe

    Modal gives AI startups the computing power they need to run their products, and a safe way to run code their AI writes on its own. Its revenue has grown 5x this year and is now closing in on $1bn annually, backed by a recent $355m raise to keep up with demand. Erik Bernhardsson is CEO at Modal. He's certain AI startups will keep needing more computing power than anyone expects, and that demand is contributing to Modal's growth. The Scaling Europe show is presented by Deel. Check them out here: https://get.deel.com/ruynb7o4lfjk Sponsors: SurrealDB: ⁠https://surrealdb.com/⁠ Airwallex: ⁠htt…

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  • High Performance Compute: Building the Cloud for AI Teams | Erik Bernhardsson | RAISE Summit 2026

    July 22, 2026 · 📺 RAISE Summit

    Erik Bernhardsson, Co-Founder & CEO of Modal, joins Hanel Baveja, Partner at Creandum, on building the high-performance cloud AI teams actually want to use. Recorded live on the Grace Hopper Stage at the Carrousel du Louvre, Paris, on July 9, 2026. RAISE Summit is Europe's leading AI gathering, bringing together 9,000+ founders, executives, investors, researchers and policymakers. Learn more: https://www.raisesummit.com Subscribe for every session from RAISE Summit 2026.

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  • Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson Explains Significance of Being Named ‘Emerging Enabler’

    July 14, 2026 · 📺 New York Stock Exchange

    Modal CEO Erik Bernhardsson joins Ashley Mastronardi on NYSE Live to discuss the significance on being named 'emerging enabler'

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  • Modal — AI Infrastructure That Developers Love

    June 10, 2026 · 📺 Cornell Tech

    FOLLOW US Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/cornelltech.... Facebook:   / cornelltech   Instagram:   / cornell_tech   LinkedIn:   / cornell-tech   TikTok:   / cornelltech   X:   / cornell_tech   Website: https://tech.cornell.edu ABOUT CORNELL TECH At Cornell Tech, we develop the leaders and technologies of tomorrow through foundational and applied research, postgraduate education, and new ventures. Through rigorous, practical research and interdisciplinary innovation, we’re advancing lasting economic and social prosperity for New York City and the world. In 2010, the City of New York issued…

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  • The Real Reason AI Infrastructure Is Breaking

    May 27, 2026 · 📺 The Information

    Modal Labs CEO Erik Bernhardsson breaks down why traditional cloud infrastructure lacks the fundamental elasticity required to manage modern, variable artificial intelligence workloads. He details how fixed capacity models are breaking development pipelines and why an independent software runtime layer has become an absolute necessity. Read more: https://www.theinformation.com/articl... Subscribe: https://www.theinformation.com/subscr... The Information’s TITV airs weekdays on YouTube, X and LinkedIn at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. Or check us out wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us: X: https:/…

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  • Inside Modal: NYC's “Monastery for Super Nerds”

    May 21, 2026 · 📺 Redpoint

    We're honored to deepen our partnership with Modal on raising $355M at a $4.65B valuation. When Erik Bernhardsson and Akshat Bubna started Modal in 2021, they knew the only way to build a truly great cloud for AI was to rebuild the entire stack from scratch. With Erik and Akshat's backgrounds, this is the right team to do it. Erik built the recommendation system behind Discover Weekly at Spotify. Akshat was an early engineer at Scale AI before partnering with Erik as co-founder and CTO. Together, they've assembled what one engineer affectionately calls "a monastery for super nerds." Five y…

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  • The Compute 100: Erik Bernhardsson, CEO of Modal

    May 20, 2026 · 📺 The Compute 100

    Today's guest is ⁠Erik Bernhardsson⁠. Erik is the founder and CEO of Modal, NYC-based Series B infrastructure startup, most recently valued 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…

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  • Stanford AI Club ft. Modal: Scaling the Future of AI Compute

    April 29, 2026 · 📺 Stanford AI Club and Modal

    This talk was recorded as part of the Stanford AI Club’s Speaker Series. Erik Bernhardsson is co-founder and CEO of Modal, the serverless platform for AI, data, and ML teams that enables effortless deployment of generative AI models, large-scale batch jobs, and job queues with scaling across thousands of CPUs and GPUs. Prior to founding Modal, he served as CTO of Better.com (2015–2020), scaling the engineering team from 1 to 300 people, and spent seven years at Spotify building the company’s music recommendation systems while open-sourcing widely used tools such as Luigi and Annoy. Erik hold…

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“Inference is an incredible business growing so fast with open source models. We have seen so much demand for inference. There are a lot of providers in the space and we think inference is just one part of the package. We think about reinforcement learning and sandboxes. What we have seen continuously over the last few years is as token prices drop, it creates more demand for these things. Customers exploding overnigh”

“We see demand coming from different types of companies. There are incredible AI applications getting built in. We are entering a new era of software. There are many new capabilities the new software enables us to do. We provide a lot of those building blocks. You need new building blocks for the phases. Whether it is in this phase where we are talking about sandboxes and new building blocks, the power AI applications”

“I don't know if I have like a mega deep belief, but I do think it's been a very good business to be in Neo Cloud in the last 5-10 years. I don't think necessarily a long term, like, these businesses are that differentiated. And my feeling is like in the underlying infra like, you know, it's the spice. It's like the hard sort of, you know, valuable asset is like in the infrastructure has been That's been like a very g”

“It keeps coming closer every day. I can't say when we're going to hit it, but it's very close. It's very very close, imminent level type close. At the beginning of the year we thought maybe we would end the year with half a billion or something like that. Now we're halfway through the year and I almost would be disappointed if we don't cross a billion and a half by the end of the year even more maybe. The demand is j”

“I think that today the market does not value capital efficiency. It's almost the other way around frankly because investors are very eager to invest. So, from their point of view, they're like, why are you taking a hundred million? Take a billion dollars instead because then they get a higher ownership. So it almost incentivizes capital inefficiency. I think in the long run, the public markets value return on equity ”

“I'm a proud European even though I'm a traitor. Left to the US 15 years ago. We hired 20 people in Sweden. I think there's incredible talent there. I know a lot of good people there. So we built up an office there. It's one of our three offices. We have New York, SF, and Stockholm. And hopefully starting an office in London actually pretty soon. There's just so much incredible talent here. Unfortunately US tends to b”

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