Modal's First Real User Paid ~$500 for Weather Jobs; Now It Scales Millions of Sandboxes
charles_irl · x · 2026-10-15
Modal co-founder Akshat recalls that in early 2022 the platform's first "real" user processed large-scale NOAA weather data, and the team nervously asked them to pay $500 to keep the jobs running — "we thought it was a lot." Today the numbers are far bigger. Over the past year Modal scaled to millions of concurrent sandboxes, launched secure elastic RDMA clusters for distributed training, trained state-of-the-art speculators for inference, and built a new sandbox runtime. An early user jokingly claimed the anecdote in the replies.
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