Fal.ai, a startup that hosts image, video and audio artificial intelligence models for developers, closed a new round valuing the company at more than $4 billion, four people familiar with the deal said. The company raised about $250 million, two of the people said.
Major investors in the round are Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, according to our sources. Fal did not respond to a request for comment. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins declined to comment.
The new round comes less than three months after Fal announced a $125 million Series C in a valuation of $1.5 billion led by Meritech. At the time, the company’s revenue exceeded $95 million and its platform was used by more than 2 million developers, wrote Todd Jackson, a partner at First Round Capital. LinkedIn. That was huge growth from a year ago, when TechCrunch reported that Fal had $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and 500,000 developers.
Since Fal provides the infrastructure layer for multimodal AI models (as well as media-specific ones), the company’s explosive growth is directly tied to the adoption of user-built applications. And multimodal AI is in high demand right now, especially video, as evidenced by the growing popularity of OpenAI’s Sora, which climbed to the top of the US App Store even faster than ChatGPT. This huge consumer demand for apps like Sora highlights the market potential offered by Fal.
Fal provides developers with over 600 image, video, audio and 3D models, it says, and boasts that its cloud has thousands of Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs and is tuned for fast inference. It also offers tools for customizing models. Its offerings include API access, hosted through a flexible serverless offering or enterprise-ready computing clusters. While there are certainly other competitors offering model and application hosting services (Microsoft, Google, CoreWeave, to name a few), Fal’s unique focus on media and multimodal is its competitive selling point, Jackson says.
The startup’s customers range from individual developers to large corporations, including Adobe, Canva, Perplexity and Shopify. Some of the popular use cases include creating media for advertising, e-commerce and gaming content.
The startup was founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur, former Coinbase machine learning leader and Oracle engineer, and Gorkem Yurtseven, who was previously a developer at Amazon. Gur and Yurtseven saw an opportunity for personalized multimedia production. While other technologists were pursuing LLMs, they began optimizing Stable Diffusion for speed and scale, and have since expanded to accommodate many other such models.
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Fal previously raised nearly $200 million, according to PitchBook data. The company’s existing investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Notable Capital, First Round Capital, Unusual Ventures and Village Global.
