Graphcore vs Modal

By valuation, Graphcore is the larger company at $2.8B versus $150M — a 18.7x difference. Size can also be measured by team: Graphcore employs 500-1000 people while Modal has 30 employees.

Graphcore has raised more in total funding at $700M, compared to Modal's $20M — a gap of $680M. Combined, the two companies have completed 1 known funding rounds.

Graphcore holds the higher Awaira Score at 85/100, compared to Modal's 71/100. The Awaira Score is a composite metric factoring in valuation, funding, stage, team size, and market presence — a 14-point gap that reflects meaningful differences in scale or traction.

Graphcore was founded by Nigel Toon in 2016. Modal was founded by Erik Bernhardsson in 2021. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

Graphcore: Graphcore designs the Intelligence Processing Unit, a processor architecture built specifically for machine learning workloads, offering a hardware alternative to NVIDIA GPUs for AI model training and inference. The Bristol-based company developed the IPU around a bulk synchronous parallel computation model that distributes model parameters across thousands of processor cores with local memory, achieving high efficiency for sparse and irregular neural network computations that GPUs handle inefficiently.\n\nThe company raised approximately $700 million across six funding rounds including a Series E that valued it at approximately $2.8 billion, with investors including Sequoia Capital, Microsoft, and Samsung Ventures. Graphcore processors are deployed in research institutions including Oxford, Cambridge, and the Rosalind Franklin Institute, as well as commercial AI platforms. The company has shipped multiple IPU generations including the MK2 IPU and Bow IPU, with the Colosseum system providing data centre scale AI compute.\n\nGraphcore competes directly against NVIDIA in the AI accelerator market, alongside AMD, Intel Gaudi, and other AI chip startups including Cerebras, SambaNova, and Groq. The AI accelerator market is projected to exceed $100 billion by 2027, driven by demand for model training compute. Graphcore faces the dominant position of NVIDIA and its CUDA software ecosystem as the primary barrier to adoption, requiring significant software investment to match the maturity of CUDA tooling that researchers and engineers have relied on for over a decade. Modal: Modal is an AI infrastructure company founded in 2021 that provides cloud computing tools for machine learning and artificial intelligence applications. The platform enables developers to build, deploy, and scale AI models with reduced infrastructure complexity. Modal's core offering centers on serverless computing infrastructure specifically optimized for AI workloads, allowing users to run GPU-intensive tasks without managing underlying hardware directly. The company positions itself within the broader AI infrastructure category, competing alongside platforms like Replicate, Lambda Labs, and cloud providers' AI services. Modal's approach focuses on simplifying the deployment pipeline for machine learning models, enabling developers to move from development to production environments more efficiently. The platform supports various frameworks and use cases including LLM inference, image generation, and general machine learning tasks. Founded in 2021, Modal operates at the Seed stage with total funding of $20 million and a valuation of $0.1 billion. The company benefits from growing demand for accessible AI infrastructure as organizations scale machine learning workloads. Modal's customer base includes AI developers and teams building applications that require computational resources beyond typical cloud offerings. The competitive landscape remains fragmented, with multiple players addressing different aspects of AI infrastructure. Modal's growth trajectory reflects broader market expansion in AI tooling and infrastructure services. Modal addresses the infrastructure gap between AI research and production deployment by offering serverless computing optimized specifically for GPU-intensive machine learning workloads.

Graphcore was founded first in 2016, giving it 5 years of additional market experience. Modal was founded later in 2021. In AI, even a year or two of head start can translate into significantly more training data, customer relationships, and institutional knowledge.

Graphcore has approximately 500-1000 employees, while Modal has approximately 30. A larger team often signals higher revenue or venture backing, but in AI, smaller teams are increasingly capable of building at scale.

Yes, Graphcore and Modal are direct competitors — both operate in the AI Infrastructure space and likely target overlapping customer segments. This comparison is especially relevant for buyers evaluating both platforms.