AI infrastructure provider Modular, announced that the company has raised $100 million in a new funding round led by General Catalyst. The round also saw participation from existing investors GV (Google Ventures), SV Angel, Greylock, and Factory.
The new funding follows Modular’s $30 million round last June. The company claims that its AI infrastructure stack smoothly integrates into clients’ setups with minimal migration expenses, natively supporting various clouds, hardware accelerators, and AI frameworks.
“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,” Deep Nishar, Managing Director at General Catalyst, said in a statement.
Modular was founded by Chris Lattner (co-founder & CEO) and Tim Davis (co-founder & President) who met each other while working at Google.
Lattner has built AI and core systems at prominent technology companies such as Apple, Google, SiFive, and Tesla.
Likewise, Davis contributed to the founding, development and expansion of significant segments within Google’s AI infrastructure at Google Brain.
With its infrastructure offerings, Modular aims to help developers defragment their AI technology stack, accelerate new product creation and increase the accessibility of AI technology.
The company recently launched the Modular Inference Engine to streamline AI deployment.
The engine asserts itself as “the world’s fastest unified AI engine,” compatible with several AI frameworks including TensorFlow and PyTorch. While currently fine-tuned for CPUs, GPU support is slated for introduction in the upcoming fall season.
Modular’s Proprietary Programming Language
Additionally, the company introduced Mojo, an exclusive programming language tailored for AI developers. In its developmental phase, Mojo asserts a speed advantage of 35,000 times over Python, merging Python’s user-friendliness with the performance of C.
Concurrently, Modular has revealed plans for Mojo’s desktop availability alongside a comprehensive developer toolkit. The company noted that the capability to run Mojo locally is the most coveted feature within its developer community.
Modular envisions this feature as a catalyst for innovation and collaboration within the Mojo developer sphere.
The company is offering a preview of the Mojo SDK to early adopters today, with a general release planned for early September.
Source: mPost
