Fal.ai, a startup that provides hosted image, video, and audio AI models for developers, has closed a new funding round that values the company at over four billion dollars. According to sources familiar with the deal, the company raised approximately two hundred and fifty million dollars. Major investors in this round are reported to be Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia. The company and the investors declined to comment on the deal.
This new funding arrives less than three months after Fal announced a one hundred and twenty-five million dollar Series C round at a one and a half billion dollar valuation. At that time, the company’s revenue had crossed ninety-five million dollars and its platform was used by over two million developers. This represents massive growth from a year ago, when reports indicated Fal had ten million dollars in annualized recurring revenue and five hundred thousand developers.
Since Fal provides the infrastructure layer for multimodal AI models, its explosive growth is directly tied to user adoption of applications built on its technology. Multimodal AI is in heavy demand, particularly for video, as shown by the soaring popularity of OpenAI’s Sora. This consumer demand for such applications underscores the market potential for Fal’s offerings.
Fal provides developers with access to over six hundred image, video, audio, and 3D models. The company states that its cloud has thousands of Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs and is fine-tuned for speedy inference. It also offers tools for customizing models. Developers can access its services via an API, a flexible serverless offering, or through enterprise-ready compute clusters. While there are other competitors in the model hosting space, Fal’s singular focus on media and multimodal AI is considered its key competitive selling point.
The startup’s customers range from individual developers to large companies like Adobe, Canva, Perplexity, and Shopify. Popular use cases for its technology include media creation for advertising, e-commerce, and gaming content.
Fal was co-founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur, a former Coinbase machine learning leader and Oracle engineer, and Gorkem Yurtseven, a former developer at Amazon. The founders identified an opportunity in personalized multimedia generation. While other technologists focused on large language models, they concentrated on optimizing Stable Diffusion for speed and scale, later expanding to host many other models.
Prior to this new round, Fal had raised nearly two hundred million dollars. The company’s existing investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Notable Capital, First Round Capital, Unusual Ventures, and Village Global.