AI infrastructure company Modular has secured $250m in a Series C funding round, bringing its total raised capital to $380m since its inception in 2022.

The latest investment is led by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT). The funding round also saw participation from DFJ Growth along with existing backers GV (Google Ventures), General Catalyst, and Greylock Ventures.

Modular’s valuation has now risen to $1.6bn, nearly tripling the company’s worth compared to its previous funding round.

The new funding will be directed towards scaling the Modular platform for broader use in the cloud and on edge devices, aiming to improve throughput, latency, cost efficiency and accuracy for a range of AI workloads.

The company is currently recruiting across multiple roles in North America and Europe.

Founded in the San Francisco Bay Area, Modular is developing what it describes as a unified compute layer for AI.

The company has developed an enterprise-grade AI inference stack aimed at consolidating disparate hardware and software environments into a single platform.

According to Modular, its platform replaces vendor-specific runtimes such as CUDA and ROCm, which are typically tied to individual hardware providers, with a universal low-level layer.

Tull said: “Strategic AI implementation is the most important competitive factor in today’s economy, and as the public and private sectors ramp up their efforts to remain competitive, the demand for compute power to handle these heavy workloads is greater than ever.

“Modular is foundational in this new era of diverse AI infrastructure, providing a unified AI compute layer that maximises efficiency, resilience, and cost reduction – and their platform is already in high demand from enterprises, clouds and developers.”

Since launching its platform in 2023, Modular has reported rapid adoption rates, claiming tens of thousands of monthly downloads, and a 75% month-on-month growth rate.

The company stated that it has released more than 600,000 lines of open-source code and achieved widespread developer engagement, with over 24,000 GitHub stars and active users in more than 100 countries.

Modular’s technology reportedly powers production workloads serving trillions of tokens daily and is used by hundreds of thousands of developers.

The company indicated that its software supports both cloud and edge hardware platforms, including compatibility with central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs) from various vendors such as Nvidia, AMD, and Apple, as well as emerging application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).

With the release of version 25.6, Modular claims performance improvements ranging from 20% to 50% compared to other AI inference frameworks on next-generation hardware.

Modular CEO Chris Lattner said: “When we founded Modular, we believed that the world needed a unified platform for AI, and today, that vision is more important than ever.

“This funding will enable us to realise that vision for developers, enterprises and hardware companies around the world.”

Modular’s organisational footprint includes more than 130 employees across North America, the UK, and Europe.

Its client and partner ecosystem spans enterprises such as Inworld and SF Compute, research teams such as Jane Street, cloud service providers including Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Lambda Labs, and Tensorwave, and hardware manufacturers such as AMD and Nvidia.