
Source: Inference provider Modal Labs closing in on $750M round at $15.75B valuation
THE SO WHAT
Inference infra is now being priced like a strategic utility, not a dev tool — a $750M round at a $15.75B valuation, tripling in four months, is a bet that serving tokens at scale is its own category. If you’re building on third-party inference, model your vendor and concentration risk the same way you would a core cloud provider.
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