Modal Labs, Co-Founded by a Former Spotify Engineer, Opens in London

Modal Labs — the AI infrastructure company co-founded by Swedish entrepreneur Erik Bernhardsson, who spent six years at Spotify helping build its music recommendation engine before starting Modal in 2021 — is opening its first London office. Alongside co-founder and CTO Akshat Bubna, previously an engineer at Scale AI, Bernhardsson has built Modal around computing infrastructure for AI inference, the process of actually running trained AI models rather than training them.

The new London space, in the city's Marble Arch area, is expected to hold up to 40 staff, with the full team in place by early September. Modal joins a wave of North American AI firms — including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Cohere — racing to establish a presence in London as it reclaims ground as Europe's leading tech hub. The company raised $355 million in May at a $4.65 billion valuation, up sharply from $1.1 billion just eight months earlier.

What stands out about Modal's footprint is the path it's taken to get here: an existing Swedish office alongside New York and San Francisco, and now London as a fourth stop. For a Swedish-founded company, that's a notably US-first sequence — building out American scale before circling back to Europe — the reverse of the Stockholm-then-abroad pattern we've seen elsewhere. Whether that's a deliberate GTM choice or simply where the largest AI infrastructure demand currently sits is exactly the kind of question worth putting to Bernhardsson directly.