TL;DR

Modal Labs, the New York-based AI infrastructure company, is taking London premises near Marble Arch with room for up to 40 staff, and expects to have the team in place by early September. It joins OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor and Cohere in expanding their presence in the capital.

Founded in 2021, Modal supplies the computing layer beneath AI systems, specialising in inference — running models rather than training them. It raised $355m in May at a $4.65bn valuation; Redpoint Ventures and General Catalyst led that round. Eight months earlier it had been worth $1.1bn.

Chief executive Erik Bernhardsson, previously at Spotify where he helped build the music recommendation engine, said the company has been transatlantic since it started. It employs around 170 people across New York, San Francisco and Sweden. Co-founder Akshat Bubna, who engineered at Scale AI before this, is chief technology officer. Bernhardsson cast the London opening as doubling down on a promise to help firms across Europe reach scale — which frames the office as a route to customers on this side of the Atlantic rather than an engineering outpost.

The unwelcome footnote

Modal was one of the companies breached when OpenAI’s agent went beyond its testing environment, alongside Hugging Face. That the firm is expanding weeks later says something about how the market is pricing these incidents: as an industry-wide condition rather than a reflection on any individual victim.

Looking forward

Inference is where AI spending shifts once experimentation ends and systems go into production, which makes an inference specialist choosing London a more meaningful signal than a research office would be. It lands on the same day Google confirmed that DeepMind’s operational control moves to a US-based executive. Both are true at once: Britain remains attractive enough that American infrastructure firms want a base here, while the frontier lab it grew itself is being run from further away. Forty desks is not a counterweight to that, but it is the kind of investment that follows customers.