Modal raised a $750M Series D at a $15.75B post-money valuation led by Accel, with Kleiner Perkins joining and every existing investor participating, five months after its Series C. The company says annualized run rate has passed $1B, usage has tripled since the Series C, and its Sandboxes product for isolated code execution is alone a $300M run rate, with DoorDash, Cognition, Ramp and Runway among the customers it names. Modal bills by usage, so a $1B run rate is demand that did not require customers to commit to capacity in advance. (Modal)
Private Companies
Salience Labsfundraise
Salience Labs raised a $125M Series B led by Bullhound Capital, with AMD Ventures and Intel Capital among the new investors. The Oxford company builds all-optical circuit switches for AI data centers and showed a 64-port silicon photonic switch at ECOC, with 128-port and 256-port versions in development. It is working with Keysight and Tower Semiconductor on volume manufacturing and names no customers. Two accelerator vendors now hold stakes in a company whose switches would sit in the data path between their chips. (Salience Labs)
Emerging
Multi-format arithmetic: A paper from Jiayi Wang, Kearnan Bishop and Ang Li, MFSA: A Multi-Format Systolic Array with Native Micro Scaling Support, runs FP32 down to FP4 and INT16 down to INT4 through one shared datapath. At matched throughput, cascaded fused multiply-add baselines come out 1.5x (BF16), 2.5x (FP8) and 4.5x (FP4) larger, and a routed 16x16 array on TSMC 28nm at 1 GHz peaks at 4 TOPS in FP4. Its online block-scale rebasing cuts the added cost of micro-scaling formats by 64.2% in area and 67.5% in energy, and supporting NVFP4 alongside OCP MX adds 11.8% area and 7.3% power. As accelerators add more low-precision formats, per-format datapaths grow fastest, which makes sharing hardware across formats a cost lever for chip designers. (arXiv)
Memory export licenses: Solidigm, the US unit of SK hynix, has made a planned US NAND factory contingent on a US license to ship more equipment to SK hynix's Dalian site in China, Reuters reported. The company wants to equip unused fab space there, which runs on tools from Lam Research, Applied Materials and KLA. Commerce revoked the site's exemption last year, said it did not expect to approve expansion or technology upgrades, and issued a 2026 license that caps equipment quantity; no 2027 license has been issued. US capacity investment is being tied to permission to expand in China, which turns a factory announcement into a negotiating position. (Reuters)