Fal, a San Francisco-based startup hosting and running AI video, image, and audio models, has raised $1.3 billion in its latest funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Nvidia, Sound Ventures, and T. Rowe Price. This deal values Fal at $16 billion, doubling its $8 billion valuation from April, according to Bloomberg.
The startup announced its Series E and F rounds simultaneously, noting that a combined $1.65 billion was raised across the two rounds (with Sequoia leading the earlier round).
This latest funding comes amid soaring demand for inference services, the process of running a trained AI model to generate outputs, particularly from customers relying on open-source models. Fal has surpassed $800 million in annualized revenue this year, as reported by Bloomberg.
Companies providing inference services, including Baseten, Fireworks AI, and Modal, are also growing rapidly and raising large sums at elevated valuations. However, gross margins in this sector remain thin due to the high cost of purchasing or leasing compute power.
Fal was co-founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur, a former Coinbase machine learning leader and Oracle engineer, and Gorkem Yurtseven, a former Amazon developer.
The Editorial Staff at AIChief is a team of professional content writers with extensive experience in AI and marketing. Founded in 2025, AIChief has quickly grown into the largest free AI resource hub in the industry.