Modal raises $750M; BBC says Anthropic had $16.8B quarter

Modal Series D: AI infrastructure company Modal raised a $750 million Series D at a $15.75 billion post-money valuation, co-founder Erik Bernhardsson wrote in a company blog post Wednesday. Accel led the round, Kleiner Perkins joined and existing investors including Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst and Lux Capital participated, according to the post. Modal recently crossed $1 billion in annualized run rate, and usage has tripled since its Series C five months ago, Bernhardsson wrote.

Anthropic revenue: Anthropic told prospective investors its revenue rose 45% to $16.8 billion in the three months through Sept. 30, the BBC reported. The figures came at a briefing Wednesday ahead of a stock market listing expected before year-end, according to the BBC. An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment, the BBC reported.

Nvidia U.K. compute: Nvidia pledged what it called “a compute donation valued at $250 million over five years” for agentic AI safety and security research in the U.K., the company said Tuesday in a newsroom post. The compute will be delivered through U.K.-based Nvidia Cloud Partners, Nvidia said. Most will go to the wider U.K. research community, with shares for Oxford’s BOLD lab, UCL’s SOFAIR lab and Imperial College London, according to the company.

xAI Grok Voice 3.0: xAI released Grok Voice 3.0, a speech-to-speech model it says ranks first on Artificial Analysis’s Speech-to-Speech Index with a score of 86.9, according to an xAI post Wednesday. The model also scores 97% on Full Duplex Bench, which measures handling of pauses and interruptions, xAI said. It is available in xAI’s Voice Agent API at $0.08 a minute, the company said.