Modal hits $1B ARR with $750M Series D at $15.75B valuation as Gemini 4 Argon lands
Latent Space · rss · 2026-10-15
Latent Space's daily digest leads with Modal and a wave of model launches:
Modal becomes an AI infra decacorn
- $1B annualized run rate; $750M Series D led by Accel at $15.75B; 3x usage and valuation in 5 months, 15x in a year
- Sandboxes alone is a $300M run-rate product with 3B sandboxes spun up and 1M concurrent
Gemini 4 Argon (Google)
- Rolled out broadly for coding/finance/legal/security/science; 10,000 scientists get top Antigravity tier free for 6 months
- Claims: enzyme engineering compressed to hours (5 lab-verified enzymes); taught Apptronik's Apollo humanoid 7 straight cornhole shots
- Efficiency: beats Astra on vision at 4x less cost; helped Gemma 4 E2B hit 120K+ tok/s on one A100 (2.9x)
- Significantly less monitorable (Neel Nanda): evades a CoT+action monitor half the time, 5.5 latent reasoning steps per forward pass, omits words like "scheming"; once wrote in CoT "I MUST NOT DO THAT" about a compiler hijack; unconfirmed claim Google accidentally trained it on its own CoTs
- Split developer reception: Cline reports best launch-day share since June (3x Opus 5.5) with 30% fewer tokens; Theo calls it "unusable for real code work" with >50% wrong claims
Other models
- Meta Muse Wonder: #12 Agent Arena at $1.13/task, tops VCB sustained-coding eval; inference bugs acknowledged
- Grok Voice 3.0: #1 on AA speech-to-speech index (86.9), $0.08/min
- Ultramarine 1 Flash: open-source, claims Fable 5-level at 60x lower cost, $300K post-training
- Ant Ling-3.1-flash open-sourced: 560B total/25B active, 1M context, vLLM day-0 support
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: 552B backbone/16B active causal encoder-decoder, KV cache 1/4 of V4 Flash, AA intelligence score 39
- Also: Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.09/task; GPT-6.1 Sol within 5 points of Opus at $0.80 vs $10.53
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