Modal opens London office to sell its AI cloud across Europe

Why it matters

Modal's London office turns a long-standing Stockholm engineering base into a wider European sales push, with compliance work likely to matter as much as local hiring.

Modal co-founder and CEO Erik Bernhardsson is opening a London office to build a European commercial operation around an engineering presence that Modal has spent years assembling in Stockholm.

The September 2 announcement marks Modal's second European office. Hugh Killingbeck-Jones has joined as VP EMEA and will build teams serving startups and enterprises across sales, solutions engineering, partnerships and marketing. Modal expects to add engineering and other functions in London over time.

For Bernhardsson, the expansion is a return to familiar ground. He grew up in the Stockholm area, earned a physics degree from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and joined Spotify around 2009. He later built the first version of Spotify's recommendation technology, including systems associated with Related Artists, Radio and Discover Weekly, according to his biography.

Bernhardsson also created Luigi, Spotify's open-source workflow engine, and Annoy, a library for nearest-neighbor search. After Spotify, he ran Better.com's roughly 300-person technology organization from February 2015 until January 2021. Those jobs put him on both sides of the infrastructure problem Modal is trying to solve: building data-intensive systems and managing the engineers responsible for keeping them running.

He founded Modal in 2021 with Akshat Bubna, an International Olympiad in Informatics gold medalist and former early engineer and engineering manager at Scale AI. Modal built its own file system, container runtime, scheduler and image builder so developers could define infrastructure in Python and run inference, training, batch processing and agent workloads without directly managing servers or Kubernetes.

Stockholm built the technical beachhead

Modal's European operation did not begin with a London lease. Bernhardsson said Modal has employed engineers in Stockholm since its early days, and that group has grown to almost 20 people. The Stockholm engineers work on Modal's custom file system and substantial parts of Sandboxes, the secure containers Modal offers for executing code generated by users or AI agents.

That division of labor gives the London opening a clear purpose. Stockholm remains a systems engineering center. London gives Modal a local base for converting European AI development into revenue, starting with commercial and customer-facing hires.

Modal named German image-model developer Black Forest Labs and Swedish legal AI developer Legora among its European users. Modal says Black Forest Labs uses its infrastructure to distribute model evaluations across containers, while Legora runs thousands of isolated evaluations in Sandboxes. DoorDash also uses Modal across markets, according to the announcement.

Sandboxes have become central to Modal's pitch as coding agents and reinforcement-learning systems require large numbers of short-lived execution environments. In May, Modal said more than 1 billion Sandboxes had been launched.

European startups building legal, health, biotech and financial applications also bring requirements that cannot be handled by opening a sales office alone. Bernhardsson singled out local regulation as an area where European customers differ from their US counterparts, and said Modal plans further investment.

Modal's data-residency documentation supports regional controls for customers with European regulatory requirements. The company says it plans to invest further in those capabilities as it expands in the region.

That gives the London operation work beyond conventional account sales. Solutions engineers will have to map Modal's programmable infrastructure onto customers' compliance and data flows, particularly for enterprises whose workloads include personal, financial or health information.

A well-funded push for regional distribution

Modal has ample capital to fund the expansion. In a May 21 financing announcement, Modal said it raised $355 million at a $4.65 billion post-money valuation, bringing total funding above $466 million. General Catalyst and Redpoint led the round, with Menlo Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and Accel joining as new investors.

Modal also reported more than $300 million in annualized revenue in May, up fivefold since September 2025, and a workforce of more than 120 people. Those figures are self-reported and Modal has not published a geographic breakdown. The London hiring drive nevertheless shows where Bernhardsson wants a portion of that capital deployed: closer to European buyers rather than solely into additional US distribution.

The competitive field includes RunPod, Replicate, Baseten, fal, Fireworks, Together AI and Beam, alongside the major cloud platforms. Modal's bet is that a general-purpose, Python-native runtime can serve multiple parts of an AI application's lifecycle, from model training and inference to batch jobs and agent execution. A local European organization gives Modal more people to explain that broader product to enterprises accustomed to buying narrower tools or assembling infrastructure directly from cloud services.

London gives Modal a commercial base near European AI companies, investors and enterprise customers. Bernhardsson watched Spotify grow from Stockholm into a global platform. With Modal, he is applying the same geographic lesson in reverse: keep foundational engineering close to the talent that built it, then place commercial operators where the customers are gathering.