Stephanie Wong

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

Erik Bernhardsson, Hanel Baveja, Eric, Stephanie Wong, Jose Quinonez

Founded by former Spotify executive Eric in the wake of a pandemic sabbatical, Modal addresses the AI infrastructure gap by rebuilding cloud systems from scratch to manage over 20,000 GPUs without relying on Kubernetes or Docker. The company’s usage-based model currently derives roughly 67% of revenue from LLM inference while introducing proprietary tools like AutoEndpoints to automate deployment and enable dynamic performance optimization. Facing a renewed global GPU shortage, Modal plans to expand its network of cloud partnerships and build proprietary data centers to support the industry's shift toward open-source model fine-tuning and real-time audio-video processing.