The AI Money Skipped the Models This Week

Good morning, Mason here,

This week the money skipped the model labs.

Modal Labs is closing in on $750 million at a $15.75 billion valuation.

Snorkel AI nearly tripled its price tag in 16 months.

Island and Cyera each pulled in $400 million to keep AI agents in line.

And Bill Ackman just backed a brain-implant company.

Six rounds. One direction.

The money is buying everything built around the models.

Read time: 5 mins

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FOLLOW THE MONEY

Photo: Modal

Four months ago Modal raised $355 million at $4.65 billion. Now TechCrunch reports Accel is leading a $750 million round at $15.75 billion. Not closed yet, but close.

Modal does inference, which is a fancy word for running an AI model after it's trained. You hand it a model, it grabs the GPUs, runs the job and bills you by the second. Cognition, Suno, Ramp and Substack all use it. CEO Erik Bernhardsson came from Spotify and Better.com, and CTO Akshat Bubna came from Scale AI.

Here's why this one matters. You only train a model once, but you pay to run it every single time someone uses it. Modal isn't the only one cashing in either. Axios reported last week that Baseten got approached at around $26 billion, double its June price, and Fireworks reportedly passed $1 billion in annualized revenue back in July.

So the whole inference category got repriced in one week. My worry is that three heavily funded companies are selling pretty much the same thing while GPUs keep getting cheaper. Sooner or later someone starts cutting prices.

Photo: Snorkel AI

Snorkel raised a $350 million Series E at $3.5 billion. Insight Partners and S32 led it. In May 2025 the company was worth $1.3 billion.

The revenue backs it up. Snorkel's annualized run rate is $375 million, up 18x in a year. CEO Alex Ratner basically rebuilt the company to get there. It used to sell software that helped you label your own data. Now it sells the finished datasets and training environments straight to the frontier labs, built with synthetic data plus paid experts.

That change is what I keep coming back to. Other data companies hand most of their revenue, something like 60 to 70 percent, over to the experts they hire. Snorkel's accounting is different. It treats what it pays experts as a cost of making the product and then sells the product, which on paper makes it look a lot closer to a software company than a staffing shop.

Whether investors keep valuing it like software depends on how much of that expert work machines end up doing. Worth watching.

Photo: Micro1

A year ago Micro1 was worth $500 million. Forbes reports it just raised more than $100 million in a Series B at $4 billion.

Founder Ali Ansari started it as an AI recruiting tool. Early last year it was doing about $7 million in annual revenue. Now it's past $500 million, mostly from selling training data to frontier labs, Microsoft, Amazon and the robotics company 1X. Two AI labs that are customers reportedly put money in, and so did two xAI co-founders.

Here's the catch. That $500 million is gross, and a big chunk goes straight to the experts Micro1 hires. At about 8x gross revenue it looks a bit cheaper than Snorkel at roughly 9x. But if Micro1 pays out 60 to 70 percent like most of its peers, it keeps something like $150 to $200 million, and on that number it's closer to 20x or more. Customers investing in you is a great sign. It also tells you how short the list of buyers is.

Photo: Island

Island raised a $400 million Series F at $6.4 billion. Evolution Equity Partners led, with Sequoia, Coatue, Insight and J.P. Morgan Growth Equity also in. The valuation has more than doubled since 2024.

Island got known for its enterprise browser. Think Chrome, except IT decides what you can copy, download or share. The new money goes to what Island calls an "agentic control plane," one system that sets the rules for people and AI agents across every app, device and network a company has.

This is going to matter more than people think. Companies are already giving AI agents logins and real access. Somebody has to decide what those agents can touch and keep a record of what they did. Island is betting that happens in the browser, since that's where most of the work already is.

Photo: Cyera

Same week, same check size as Island. Very different story. Cyera took a $400 million extension of its Series G from Goldman Sachs Alternatives. In June it raised $600 million at $12 billion. This time it would only say it's worth "more than $12 billion."

Cyera finds sensitive data across a company, sorts it and controls who can see it. That now includes AI agents. This is its third raise of 2026 after $400 million in January and $600 million in June, which puts it at $1.4 billion this year and more than $2 billion total.

This is the one I'd watch closest. Almost every other company in this issue got marked up by a multiple. Cyera didn't put out a new number at all. Not a bad sign by itself. But when a valuation jumps, companies usually want you to know.

Precision co-founder Ben Rapoport. Photo: Precision Neuroscience

Precision Neuroscience closed an oversubscribed $250 million Series D at a little over $1 billion. Pershing Square and the Ackman Oxman Institute, which Bill Ackman started with his wife Neri Oxman, co-led the round alongside an unnamed life sciences fund. Pershing and the institute put in $42.5 million between them. It's the institute's first investment ever.

Precision's brain-computer interface sits on the surface of the brain instead of going into it, and it's designed to come back out. That's pretty much the opposite of Neuralink. It's been used in over 100 patient procedures at 18 medical centers, and the new money goes to FDA review and getting ready to sell.

The odd one out this week, and I put it in on purpose. Everything else here is priced on how fast revenue is growing. Precision already has FDA clearance for temporary use, so it's priced on whether it gets approval for permanent implants. Totally different risk. Much slower clock.

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THE PATTERN: THE MONEY IS BUYING EVERYTHING AROUND THE MODELS

Six rounds, and they split into two clear lanes.

Lane one is the AI supply chain: Modal running models at $15.75 billion, Snorkel feeding them training data at $3.5 billion, and Micro1 doing the same at $4 billion.

Lane two is control: Island and Cyera deciding what AI agents can touch inside a company, and Precision building a direct line between the brain and a computer.

The speed is the story. Modal went from $4.65 billion to $15.75 billion in four months. Micro1 went from $500 million to $4 billion in a year. Snorkel nearly tripled. The exception was Cyera, which three months after pricing at $12 billion would only say it's now worth "more than $12 billion."

The pattern: the market is paying very different prices for different parts of the supply chain. Snorkel trades at about 9x revenue and Micro1 at about 8x gross. Modal is around 50x its last reported revenue and Baseten around 43x (both numbers are a few months old, so the real multiples are lower, but the gap is still huge). Investors are treating training data like a services business and inference like software.

For investors: Don't just ask how fast a company is growing.

Ask whether its revenue grows every time someone uses AI.

Mason's take: The quietest number in this issue is the most useful one. Modal, Baseten and Micro1 repriced 2x to 8x in under a year, and Cyera, one of the most valuable companies here, didn't announce a markup at all. If more of the leaders start raising at roughly the same price, watch whether the rest of the market follows.

Founderscrowd Newsletter | Wednesday, September 30, 2026 | The money is buying everything around the models

$15.75B to run AI. $3.5B to feed it. $400M twice to guard it.