Tim Davis On Raising $130 Million To Build A Next-Generation AI Platform To Simplify AI Development And Deployment After Multiple Startups And Scaling AI At Google

Tim Davis’s entrepreneurial journey reflects a rare blend of intellectual curiosity, scrappy resilience, and a deep commitment to building relationships and networks. He has an exciting story, which includes an acquihire by Google and the launch of his latest venture, Modular.

Modular has secured funding from top-tier investors like General Catalyst, SV Angel, Sherpalo Ventures, FactoryHQ, and Greylock.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Tim Davis’s unconventional education and early passion for gaming laid the groundwork for a bold entrepreneurial path spanning multiple industries and continents.
• His first startup experience taught him the hard lessons of equity, risk, and the limitations of the Australian fundraising ecosystem.
• Moving to Silicon Valley transformed his trajectory, exposing him to global talent, scrappy startup culture, and ultimately Google’s scale.
• Google Brain became a pivotal experience, where Tim gained deep exposure to AI and formed critical relationships that fueled his next venture.
• With Modular, Tim is building a hardware-agnostic platform for AI compute, aiming to decentralize and optimize AI infrastructure.
• His fundraising strategy, centered on narrative memos instead of pitch decks, has helped raise over $130M and foster deeper investor alignment.
• Tim’s focus on structured thinking, writing culture, and mentorship reflects his belief in clarity, networks, and paying it forward.

 

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Keep in mind that storytelling is everything in fundraising. In this regard, for a winning pitch deck to help you, take a look at the template created by Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley legend (see it here), which I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash. 

Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

About Tim Davis:

Tim Davis is the President & Co-founder at Modular, whose mission is to create an AI hardware abstraction layer for the world. Previously, he served as a PM at Google, helping to create & scale AI systems inside Google Brain, including infrastructure like TensorFlow, on-device AI & large model infrastructure.

Tim studied Engineering, Finance, and Law in Australia and the US, and now resides in California. He has been developing AI systems for more than a decade.

Connect with Tim Davis:

• LinkedIn
• Crunchbase
• TimDavis.com
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty, hello everyone, and welcome to the DealMaker Show. Today we have a very exciting founder, and we’re going to be having the battle of accents—Australia, Spain, a little bit of everything. But definitely quite the inspiring story. We’re going to be talking about hypergrowth companies, about working at larger companies, and also about building hyper-networks—how to think about that and how to build relationships.

Alejandro Cremades: And then, obviously, all the good stuff that I love to hear: the building, the scaling, the financing. In his case, he’s raised over 130 million now. So quite the story. Again, brace yourself for quite the inspiring conversation. And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today—Tim Davis. Welcome to the show.

Tim Davis: Hey, thank you for having me. I love your show. I’ve listened to a bunch of the podcasts, so yeah—thank you for having me on.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Thank you so much, Tim. So, originally, you were born in Australia, in Melbourne. Walk us through memory lane. How was life growing up for you?

Tim Davis: Yeah, you know, it was interesting. I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s in Melbourne, Australia. My mom was an artist, and my dad was a banker.

Tim Davis: I’ve got one older brother—very creative guy—so I think we spent a lot of time outside, a lot of time just imagining different things. My dad ended up buying a Commodore 64 as our first computer at home. As a result, we became big gamers.

Tim Davis: For any of your listeners who had a Commodore 64 back then, games like Boulder Dash, Maniac Mansion, and Prince of Persia—that’s what we cut our teeth on. We started modding those games, finding hacks, and programming in BASIC way back then. That naturally moved into Windows—we became a Windows family. Mac wasn’t a dominant operating system in Australia at the time.

Tim Davis: Then we moved quickly into games like Railroad Tycoon and Doom, playing those. That was really the start of my love for technology and computer systems. I always enjoyed puzzles and math throughout school. I went off to university in Melbourne—there are really only two or three major universities there, quite different from the U.S.—and I studied chemical engineering and microbiology.

Tim Davis: I ended up spending a long time in school, studying many different things. I eventually moved into commerce, mathematics, and ultimately did an MBA and a JD.

Alejandro Cremades: I mean, what triggered all those studies? It seems so random—engineering, then a JD, like wanting to become a lawyer? That’s quite the combo.

Tim Davis: Yeah, I think part of it was not really understanding what I wanted to do. I kept flipping between a series of interests.

Tim Davis: I had a strange entrance into engineering because, in high school, I was already doing some university subjects. So, when I went to university, I ended up finishing parts of the course early.

Tim Davis: That led to me getting a bit bored with chemical engineering—it’s very heavy on fluid mechanics and such, which I wasn’t really loving. I thought maybe I should explore becoming a quantitative trader or something similar. So I went down the road of actuarial science and studied more finance.

Tim Davis: As I progressed through that, I started questioning whether I really wanted to go into investment banking. I wasn’t convinced. I was working part-time at a bank in Australia, and I just wasn’t excited about it.

Tim Davis: Not having my heart set on any specific direction, I thought maybe doing an MBA and a JD would help me find purpose and discover something interesting.

Tim Davis: Ultimately, what came out of all that was realizing that I had a passion for building businesses and doing something on my own rather than working for someone else.

Tim Davis: That was a long journey to discover, I’ll be honest, but I think every founder has one.

Alejandro Cremades: How did you discover that? Typically, you have to go through the mistake of doing a 9-to-5 to realize it’s not for you.

Tim Davis: Yeah, I did. Throughout that education journey, I did a lot of internships—in finance, analyst roles, and also at law firms. I was trying to discover if that was the culture I wanted.

Tim Davis: At the time in Australia, the growth trajectories at those types of firms were very hierarchical. There wasn’t a way for you to stand out, even if you were exceptional.

Tim Davis: It was like, “Sorry, there are three other people above you. You have to wait your turn.” That felt strange to me. It didn’t seem like there was a way to really reward and recognize talent.

Tim Davis: At that time, I didn’t even know if I’d be that talented—but the point was, why is that the system? Wouldn’t it be better to try to build something on my own and see if it works out?

Tim Davis: That really interested me. I also felt like life’s short—you should at least give it a shot.

Tim Davis: When you’re young, you have so much time. Most people don’t appreciate that. Now that I’m older and have a family, time is the scarcest resource. But when you’re young, you have the space to explore and do a lot.

Tim Davis: So I thought, here I am, I’ve done all this study—why not try building some interesting businesses?

Tim Davis: At worst, if I fail, I can lean on this education. I’m very thankful to Australia because they have a wonderful education system supported heavily by the government.

Tim Davis: You can study a lot of different things without getting saddled with lifelong debt, unlike in other countries. That was an incredible part of growing up in Australia.

Tim Davis: So I had this strong educational background and thought—why not see if I can make a go of it?

Tim Davis: That really started me on the entrepreneurial journey. Another thing—during the JD, I fell in love with technology. I studied patent law and trademark law and found it fascinating.

Tim Davis: Whether or not you believe in patent law, the point is that people pour a lot of time into innovation. I had also done some computer science, so I thought—maybe this is where I should focus.

Tim Davis: The first real business I started looking at, around 2010–2011, was the idea of recognizing brands within images. That came from learning about trademark law—seeing all these brands and wondering: could we build a way for brands to find themselves in images, and monetize that?

Tim Davis: I started that in 2011. That ties into my fundraising experience in Australia, which was pretty tough compared to the U.S.

Tim Davis: At the time, capital markets in Australia had a very different appetite for risk. It’s changing now, but back then, angels would offer $100K–$200K and ask for 20–30% of the company.

Tim Davis: That made no sense—if I needed to raise more funding or if the company became profitable quickly, I’d have already given away a huge percentage to someone who hadn’t contributed much capital compared to the personal risk I was taking.

Tim Davis: So my wife and I decided that if we were going to do this, we had to go to the United States.

Tim Davis: At the end of 2012, I got on a plane and found a hacker house in Silicon Valley—on Airbnb, actually.

Tim Davis: Funny story—the person renting the hacker house was a YC founder whose startup hadn’t worked out. They had a year-long lease, so they turned it into a kind of college dorm, trying to cover rent by inviting people to stay.

Tim Davis: At the time, I didn’t know much about Silicon Valley. It was advertised as being around the corner from Google, across from Meta—but it ended up being way out in the hills.

Tim Davis: I arrived and was like, “Where am I?” But it turned out to be an incredible place. There were entrepreneurs from around the world, other YC folks, really talented people who came to hang out at the house.

Tim Davis: That’s actually where I met my first co-founder for what became my second startup. After arriving in the U.S., I decided not to pursue the image recognition business.

Tim Davis: We started a new company. Since we were way out in the hills, we asked—“Who in this house wants food delivery?”

Tim Davis: Everyone said yes. I built the front and back end of the app. He was an iOS developer and built the mobile app.

Tim Davis: We ended up building one of the first food delivery services—this was before Uber Eats. At the time, we didn’t realize it, but DoorDash was also being created by its founders. They were called Palo Alto Delivery back then.

Tim Davis: And we had decided, like, hey, why don’t we build this? One of the key innovations we had come up with was—I remember going down Palo Alto into a bunch of restaurants, asking the folks, “Hey, look, would you be interested if there was a company that could send you orders?”

Tim Davis: And a lot of the restaurant owners laughed at my co-founder and me, saying, “Why would we want to give you commission? Why would we want to work with you?” I remember going home—we actually had a pretty good prototype working really well—and I said,

Tim Davis: I ended up saying to my co-founder, “Look, I was looking at the Grubhub financial statements, and it’s amazing how much of their business is just pure sales and marketing. They have a massive force of people going around America trying to sign up restaurants, 10% commission at a time.”

Tim Davis: I said, “We just experienced this ourselves walking down Palo Alto—we just got rejected time after time.” So, in the end, what we ended up doing was adding every restaurant without their permission at the time and inflating the prices by 10 to 20%.

Tim Davis: What we discovered at the time was that what consumers actually wanted was selection. That was the unique unlock. So, we launched locally—this was now in 2013. I gloss over some of this, but we traveled, we recruited another co-founder from America, and he helped build the business in the United States. My co-founder and I were also coding remotely until we could sort out the visa situation.

Tim Davis: When we launched the platform, it just exploded because there wasn’t another option on the market that had added every restaurant.

Tim Davis: Very quickly, huge numbers of people from Stanford and all around Palo Alto and the Mountain View area started ordering a significant amount of food from restaurants.

Tim Davis: And we had to quickly—

Alejandro Cremades: And how does all of that lead into Google? Because, I mean, it sounds like the journey, but not the outcome you guys would’ve hoped for.

Alejandro Cremades: It was obviously a ton of lessons learned, but joining Google is pretty amazing. So how did Google come into the picture, and how was that really structured? Was it you guys just winding down and joining? An acquihire? A proper acquisition? How did that happen?

Tim Davis: Yeah, so it was interesting. If you fast forward, we raised some seed money in the United States. And as an immigrant founder, that’s quite a journey.

Tim Davis: Over the next two, two and a half years, the business actually scaled really quickly. Food delivery—for listeners who don’t know—is a horrendous margin business.

Tim Davis: Terrible gross margins. Most of the profit actually comes from inflating food prices or getting tips as a driver.

Tim Davis: What ended up happening was Google was scaling a business called Google Express. For folks in North America, it was essentially trying to build a business not that dissimilar from Instacart—working with merchants to scale end-state delivery.

Tim Davis: Our business—in 2014 and 2015—was in a really challenging environment. There were a lot of questions around: are these workers contractors or employees? A lot of legal questions. Even today, that’s still an interesting legal space.

Tim Davis: It made fundraising very difficult. A lot of investors turned around and said, “Look, it’s great that you’re doing huge top-line revenue.” Our business was already at $10–15 million in top-line revenue, scaling quickly. The margin was horrendous, but still—

Tim Davis: “If everyone had to become an employee, what happens to this company?” And the truth was, the company probably wouldn’t survive. It really shouldn’t exist under that model. So, Google came along.

Tim Davis: We met a few people—we were based not far from Google in Mountain View—and they took an interest in the team.

Tim Davis: They weren’t interested in the business. They’d seen food delivery scale, but it wasn’t something Google wanted to do. So, we went through the acquihire process. Google said, “Hey, come in. We’ll interview you all.”

Tim Davis: “We’ll spend time with you. Get to know you.” In the end, we weren’t formally acquihired. What actually happened was a few of us—including me—joined the company, but not everyone.

Tim Davis: What Google tries to do is: if everyone gets interviewed and you’re all amazing in Google’s eyes, then yeah, they’ll take the full team.

Tim Davis: But if they don’t think everyone is exceptional, then they only bring in the people they view as particularly talented. My co-founder and I were very lucky—they thought we were skilled enough to join Google.

Tim Davis: And that’s how we ended up joining the company.

Tim Davis: Here’s my, you know, my budget. Here’s my throughput requirements and my latency requirements. And it just works. If that could exist, that would really change the way compute evolves around the world.

Tim Davis: My background was very much in product, marketing, design, and sales. Chris, my co-founder, is a world-renowned engineer. So we thought, hey, look—if we could build this—and this was not going to be an easy bet, this was going to be a big bet—

Tim Davis: If we could build this, it would probably change the nature of compute in the AI ecosystem. So we’ve spent the last few years now building this core piece of infrastructure. Infrastructure companies tend to take a bit more time to actually build the product.

Tim Davis: But now we’re really scaling go-to-market. To answer your question on how we make money: we see our business very much as a consumption-based model on compute.

Tim Davis: So we essentially have a pricing model that scales with the total amount of compute used through our platform. It’s similar to how Databricks operates with Databricks compute units.

Tim Davis: You just scale the amount of compute that goes through their platform, and they charge for it. For on-prem applications or deployments, we do a per-GPU charge.

Tim Davis: If you have your own data center and you’re using Kubernetes as your primary orchestration infrastructure, we can deploy across your GPUs and charge you on a per-GPU basis.

Tim Davis: We’re also increasingly working with different cloud providers in channel partnership arrangements. So we derive revenue from those partnerships.

Tim Davis: They can deploy our infrastructure, and we generate revenue directly through that.

Tim Davis: That’s been a very interesting and successful model for many businesses in the past. If you look at the early days of Databricks and others, they partnered with Azure. Go further back and there’s the Wintel partnership that helped Microsoft and Intel become enormous. Channel partnerships are a really interesting way to get strong distribution for us too. That’s been an exciting area we’re utilizing.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. For those listening, we actually had Ali Ghodsi of Databricks on the show, for those who’d like to check out that episode. A question I have for you, Tim: you guys have raised about $130 million, with Google being one of the investors.

Alejandro Cremades: What would you say was your biggest takeaway from this fundraising journey? This was your second time going through the process—what can you share with all the folks listening who are currently in the trenches trying to raise money?

Tim Davis: Yeah, it was interesting. When we bounced out, I actually had a very different take on fundraising this time around. First time in Silicon Valley, with my first company—I really didn’t understand much about it, to be honest.

Tim Davis: I didn’t have a strong mentorship network at the time, so I followed the traditional approach: threw a deck together and tried to outline the basics—what problem are we solving, why is now the right time, what does success look like, and so on.

Tim Davis: What we did differently for Modular was, instead of putting a deck together, we wrote a series of documents.

Tim Davis: For our seed round, we wrote a three- or four-page memo outlining what made this opportunity unique, what made us the right founders to pursue it, and why it was such a significant opportunity for the world.

Tim Davis: The reaction from investors was very positive. They said, “Wow, this is a very well-thought-out memo. Easy to read and consume.”

Tim Davis: It wasn’t the traditional pitch deck, and that really differentiated us. In fairness, both Chris and I were coming out of Google AI, and there was already interest in AI-related companies.

Tim Davis: But writing down your thoughts in that Amazonian way—using a memo as literature for investors to read—allowed us to have much deeper discussions.

Tim Davis: When we met with investors, they came in with fantastic questions. That meant our discussions instantly jumped into robust back-and-forths.

Tim Davis: We got to know them well—how they thought about things. And we’d end up at the whiteboard, sketching ideas. That absolutely did not happen during my first fundraising experience.

Tim Davis: Back then, investors were polite: “Thanks, Tim, this seems really interesting. We’ll get back to you.” Of course, when it’s your first time, you’re excited. But that’s just a polite way of saying, “We’re not interested.”

Tim Davis: Even when we raised our $100 million round, we used the same approach.

Tim Davis: This time, we had much more insight into the market, more understanding of the product, and very significant user growth—or in our case, developer growth.

Tim Davis: We provided three or four detailed papers on where the future of AI is going, the nature of compute dynamics in the market.

Tim Davis: Writing things down in that form allowed for much better conversations with investors.

Tim Davis: Many founders I’ve spoken to don’t do this. I really encourage people to try. Imagine you had to write a two-page memo that explains what you want to do, why you’re the one to do it, and why someone should fund you instead of everyone else.

Tim Davis: How would your memo be better, more visionary, more exciting, and more convincing?

Tim Davis: It’s not easy. But it forces you to really think deeply—how you’ll make money, how you describe what you’re building. You go through iterations and learn a lot.

Tim Davis: For us, that writing-first culture is core to Modular. We use a simple problem-solving framework for everything. Let me share it briefly.

Tim Davis: It’s just a few questions: What problem are you solving? Why is now the right time? What does success look like? What solution space or alternatives have you considered? And what is the thing you’re recommending?

Tim Davis: If you apply that same framework to everything—organizational decisions, hiring, sales strategy, product—it helps you move quickly to clear decisions.

Tim Davis: Either it’s obvious and we should do it, or it’s clearly not the right move. Or, it sparks a robust debate: “I agree on the problem, agree on timing, agree on success—but here are four other things we could do.”

Tim Davis: It’s a very succinct framework that drives decision-making across companies. And I try to apply it consistently at our company now.

Alejandro Cremades: My God, Tim. I could keep asking you questions nonstop, but I’ll wrap up with this: for the people listening who want to reach out, ask questions, or connect with you—what’s the best way?

Tim Davis: Yeah, my personal email is just ti*@******is.com. I own the domain timdavis.com, so people can Google it and reach out. I try to help as many people as I can.

Tim Davis: It’s a tough journey coming from another country, landing in the U.S., knowing no one, and trying to build something important for the world.

Tim Davis: In the end, everything that matters in Silicon Valley is people—how you treat people, your relationships, your reputation. Those become your most valuable assets over time.

Tim Davis: So if I can help anyone, don’t hesitate to reach out. I try to respond to most emails. I apologize if I don’t get to everyone within 24 hours, but I do try my best.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, Tim, thank you so much for being on the DealMaker Show today. It has been an absolute honor to have you with us.

Tim Davis: Thanks so much.

*****

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