Startup Fal raises $1.3 billion at a $16 billion valuation — TechCrunch

San Francisco-based startup Fal, which hosts and runs artificial intelligence models for video, images and audio, has raised $1.3 billion in a Series F funding round. The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Nvidia, Sound Ventures and T. Rowe Price also participating. According to Bloomberg, as reported by TechCrunch, the deal valued Fal at $16 billion — double its $8 billion valuation in April.

Investors and two rounds

Fal simultaneously announced its Series E and Series F rounds, raising a total of $1.65 billion. The previous round was led by Sequoia.

Bloomberg also reported that earlier this year, Fal's annualized revenue exceeded $800 million.

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Demand for inference

The Series F round came amid growing demand for inference — running an already trained AI model to generate outputs. This demand is most closely linked to customers using open-source models.

Baseten, Fireworks AI and Modal are also growing rapidly in the inference segment, raising significant investments at high valuations. At the same time, according to several people familiar with the financial performance of such companies, their gross margins remain low because of the high cost of buying or renting computing capacity.

Fal was founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur, who previously led machine learning at Coinbase and worked as an engineer at Oracle, and Gorkem Yurtseven, a former Amazon developer.