Modal Labs, Co-Founded by 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, in a round led by Redpoint Ventures and General Catalyst.

Modal has been transatlantic since its earliest days, with New York, San Francisco, and Stockholm all part of its footprint from the start. London becomes a fourth location and its first in the UK, extending a structure the company says was built this way from day one.