Erik Bernhardsson is Co-Founder and CEO at Modal, a serverless AI infrastructure platform that enables developers to deploy and scale compute-intensive workloads for machine learning and data processing. Modal has raised over $110M and achieved unicorn status with a $1.1B valuation.

Erik spent 7 years at Spotify where he built the music recommendation system as employee number 30, then served as CTO at Better.com for 6 years, scaling the engineering team from 1 to 300 people. He studied Physics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and has a gold medal from the International Olympiad in Informatics.

Erik created popular open-source projects including Luigi (workflow scheduler) and Annoy (approximate nearest neighbors library), both still widely used at companies like Spotify, Uber, and Instacart. He holds three patents on recommender systems and co-organizes the NYC Machine Learning meetup.

Modal was founded in 2021 and raised an $80M Series B in 2025, bringing total funding to $111M from investors including Lux Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Amplify Partners. Customers include Meta, Scale AI, Ramp, and Substack.

Modal's platform can scale to thousands of GPUs in seconds and serves over 100 large enterprises, with the company reaching 8-figure revenue by 2024. The platform processes generative AI inference, LLM fine-tuning, and large-scale batch jobs for leading AI companies.