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Modal Labs nears $750M round at $15.75B valuation, led by Accel

AI inference infrastructure provider Modal Labs is close to finalizing a $750 million funding round led by Accel, valuing the company at $15.75 billion including the new capital, according to a source familiar with the deal. That figure more than triples Modal's $4.65 billion valuation from a $355 million raise just four months earlier. Modal declined to comment on the report.

techcrunch.com · 2026-09-28

Fireworks Research launches Ember-1, a leaner version of Kimi K3

Fireworks Research released Ember-1, a specialized model built on Kimi K3 that matches its quality while using 40% fewer tokens. The company says it trained the model to reason more efficiently rather than simply reducing reasoning effort, using more than 50 training experiments and 200 evaluations run on its Serverless Training platform. Ember-1 is available now and is described as the first in an ongoing series of specialized models from Fireworks.

fireworks.ai · 2026-09-27