Zilliz vs Modal

Modal has a disclosed valuation of $150M, while Zilliz's valuation is not publicly available, making a direct size comparison difficult. Modal employs 30 people.

Zilliz has raised more in total funding at $113M, compared to Modal's $20M — a gap of $93M. Combined, the two companies have completed 1 known funding rounds.

Modal holds the higher Awaira Score at 71/100, compared to Zilliz's 65/100. The Awaira Score is a composite metric factoring in valuation, funding, stage, team size, and market presence — a 6-point gap that reflects meaningful differences in scale or traction.

Zilliz was founded by Charles Xie in 2017. Modal was founded by Erik Bernhardsson in 2021. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

Zilliz: Zilliz is the commercial company behind Milvus, the most widely deployed open-source vector database, and operates Zilliz Cloud, a fully managed vector database service built on that foundation. Milvus supports billion-scale vector collections with high throughput and low-latency query performance, and is widely used in AI search, recommendation, and retrieval-augmented generation applications.\n\nThe company raised approximately 113 million USD and has established Milvus as a standard component of the AI infrastructure stack at large technology companies and enterprises globally, with substantial adoption in China, the United States, and Southeast Asia. The open-source project has accumulated tens of thousands of GitHub stars and an active contributor community across academic and commercial organizations.\n\nZilliz occupies a strategically important position in the vector database market as the steward of the most mature open-source option in the category. Enterprise customers who start with Milvus often migrate to Zilliz Cloud for managed operations, giving the company a land-and-expand motion built on open-source adoption. This model positions Zilliz to capture a large share of the growing enterprise vector infrastructure market as AI workloads move from experimentation to mission-critical production. 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.

Zilliz was founded first in 2017, giving it 4 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.

Zilliz has approximately 100-500 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, Zilliz 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.