In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Tim explains why Modular has raised $130M to reimagine AI compute infrastructure, and what he’s learned trying to build a platform that competes with some of the biggest names in tech.

I had a wonderful conversion with Walter Thompson about Modular some time ago, we covered AI compute, building a new AI software stack, the ups and downs of startups and scaling AI into the future 🙏🏼🚀

Republished:

Leaving a high-paying role at Google to take on NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD is not for the faint of heart, but that’s exactly what Tim Davis, co-founder and president of Modular, did.

In this episode of Fund/Build/Scale, Tim explains why Modular has raised $130M to reimagine AI compute infrastructure, and what he’s learned trying to build a platform that competes with some of the biggest names in tech.

We talked about:

🚀 Why Modular believes AI workloads need a hardware-agnostic execution platform

💡 How Tim and co-founder Chris Lattner decided to “start from the hardest part of the stack”

💰 The trade-offs of raising VC for infrastructure-heavy startups

🛠 Why Modular focuses on talent density and how they’ve recruited top engineers from Google, NVIDIA, and beyond

🌍 What it takes to break into the AI space when your competitors are trillion-dollar companies

Tim takes a thoughtful, deep-dive approach to this conversation—unpacking the complexities of AI infrastructure and what it takes to build in one of tech’s most competitive spaces. There’s valuable insight here for founders navigating technical markets or aiming to disrupt entrenched players.

RUNTIME 46:27

EPISODE BREAKDOWN

(1:26) “We are building a new accelerated execution platform for compute.”

(6:41) “ It will exist all over the place and it already does, but AI will be everywhere that compute is.”

(11:18) “ You only you only have so much time in a week. What is the thing that you're best at?”

(15:13) “ We have decided to start from the hardest part of the software stack.”

(22:44) “For the most talented people in the world, the risk is actually not as great as what you think.”

(30:24) “ Growing up in Australia, my view of the of the United States was very much driven from the media and from Hollywood.”

(33:26) “ I sat in a room for six weeks and just met everyone that I could. And that really was the beginning of a journey to the United States.”

(37:48) “ I still think there's a special place in the Bay Area, and in the United States, there is a different risk appetite.”

(40:41) The one question Tim would have to ask the CEO before he’d take a job at someone else’s early-stage startup.

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