Australian entrepreneur sells AI start-up Modular
John Stensholt wrote about the acquisition of Modular by Qualcomm in the The Australian National Newspaper.
A Silicon Valley AI software start-up co-founded and led by an Australian entrepreneur is set to be sold for $US3.9bn ($5.6bn) after only four years in business. Modular, co-founded by Melburnian Tim Davis, announced on Thursday morning
Australian time it was being acquired by Nasdaq-listed Qualcomm in an all-scrip deal. Mr Davis, 43, started Modular with American co-founder Chris Lattner in 2022, a decade after he had flown from Australia to Silicon Valley in September 2012 with dreams of becoming an entrepreneur.
He had previously had stints working as a financial analyst at National Australia Bank and then several internships at law firms like Allens and Minters after completing law, business and commerce degrees at Melbourne’s Monash University. Modular provides software that allows AI to run efficiently across hardware architectures, enabling developers to deploy AI at a lower total cost. The deal makes Mr Davis one of Australia’s most influential and successful technology founders.
His company’s platform is designed to allow developers to run AI applications across different computer chips without having to rewrite code for each one. Modular services cloud providers such as Oracle and Amazon, and also AI chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD. “So much of what we try to do [as founders], and so much of what Silicon Valley is about, is betting on these enormous technology supercycles. And this is probably the greatest supercycle in human history,” Davis told The Australian in an interview last year.
Qualcomm said as consideration for the acquisition, it expects to issue up to 19.2 million shares of its common stock to equity owners of Modular. That values the deal at around $US3.92 billion, based on Qualcomm’s share price earlier this week. The deal is expected to be finalised later this year, and will result in a big payday for Mr Davis and his shareholders after a remarkable rise in Silicon Valley for the Australian.
Modular last year raised $US250m from investors for a $US1.6bn valuation, after previously raising a combined $US130m in two deals across 2022 and 2023. Mr Davis survived a stint in a wild house known as the “Hacker Fortress”, started an early version of an online food delivery service before the rise of UberEats and others, and was poached by Google only to leave the technology giant in 2022 to co- found Modular.
“On a personal note, company building is an incredible adventure, a rollercoaster of the highest highs and the lowest lows, and the thing that matters most is to keep going – don’t stop, don’t give up,” Mr Davis wrote on LinkedIn on Thursday. “I came to the USA with nothing more than a suitcase and a laptop, and almost 14 years later it’s been the ride of a lifetime. I’m grateful to every single person who took a chance on me and gave me the opportunity to realise a dream of delivering incredible AI to the world.”
Modular claims to have built the world’s fastest AI inference engine – software that enables AI programs to run and scale to millions of people – and its own programming language, Mojo, a superset of Python (the world‘s most popular programming language), which enables developers to deploy their AI programs tens of thousands of times faster, reduce costs and make it more simple to deploy AI around the world.
Mr Davis had started his own company called CrowdSend in 2011, which had a software system for identifying objects in images and pictures and matching them to retailers, but told The Australian in a 2023 interview – his first with media in his home country – that he found it “difficult” as “investors in Australia if you wanted to raise some seed capital they would take a very large percentage of the business.”
He flew to Silicon Valley, stayed in what was called Hacker Fortress in the Los Altos Hills, where Davis developed an online food delivery business called Fluc (Food Lovers United Co) before joining Google, where he worked as a product manager and then joined the ad division where he built machine learning systems and the Google Brain research division dedicated to AI – where he met Mr Lattner.
