AI Inference Startup Fal Doubles Valuation to $16B in $1.3B Round Led by Bessemer
By James Dargan · · 1 min read
Fal, a San Francisco-based startup that hosts and runs AI video, image and audio models, has secured $1.3 billion in new funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Nvidia, Sound Ventures and T. Rowe Price, Bloomberg reported. The deal values the company at $16 billion, double the $8 billion valuation it reached in April.
Fal disclosed its Series E and Series F rounds together, bringing the combined total to $1.65 billion. Sequoia led the earlier Series E.
The latest round reflects surging demand for inference, the process of running already-trained AI models to generate outputs, especially among customers building on open source models. According to Bloomberg, Fal passed $800 million in annualized revenue earlier this year.
Rival inference providers such as Baseten, Fireworks AI and Modal have also been growing quickly and securing large rounds at rising valuations. However, people familiar with these companies’ finances say gross margins remain thin due to the high cost of buying or leasing compute.
Fal was co-founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur, a former machine learning leader at Coinbase and engineer at Oracle, and Gorkem Yurtseven, who previously worked as a developer at Amazon.
