Fal raised US$1.3 billion in a Series F round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The San Francisco startup hosts and runs AI video, image, and audio models. The round values Fal at US$16 billion, double its US$8 billion valuation from April.
Funding so far
Fal announced its Series E and Series F rounds at the same time. The two rounds total US$1.65 billion. Sequoia led the earlier Series E, and Nvidia, Sound Ventures, and T. Rowe Price joined the latest round.
Company context
Fal was co-founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven. Gur previously led machine learning at Coinbase and worked at Oracle. Yurtseven was a developer at Amazon.
Inference demand
Fal provides inference services for customers that rely on open-source models. The company makes trained models available to generate outputs. Bloomberg reported that Fal passed US$800 million in annualized revenue earlier this year.
Other inference providers include Baseten, Fireworks AI, and Modal. These companies are growing quickly and raising large rounds at higher valuations. Their gross margins remain thin because compute is expensive to buy or lease.
Read more: bloomberg.com