Erik Bernhardsson, CEO of Modal
Podcast
•
May 20, 2026
Today's guest is Erik Bernhardsson.
Erik is the founder and CEO of Modal, NYC-based Series B infrastructure startup, most recently valued at $1.1B. Modal was founded in 2021, in a pre-ChatGPT world, built to ease developer friction around deploying and running ML models at scale. The early product was inspired by Erik's time at Spotify where he built their music recommender system. Since then, Modal has become a go-to solution for developers who want fast inference across LLMs and agents. Modal is growing rapidly, hitting nearly $300M in revenue, driven by demand for their sandboxes product, which let AI agents run in isolated environments. We're thrilled to have Erik on the podcast.
Primary is a seed-stage venture firm that backs founders building at the infrastructure layer before the market catches up. $1.6B AUM, 60+ person operating team, concentrated bets. Portfolio includes Etched, The Biological Computing Company, and Atero (acquired by Crusoe).
