Fal.ai, a company that offers hosting for AI models in image, video, and audio for developers, has secured a fresh funding round that puts its valuation above $4 billion, according to four individuals with knowledge of the transaction. Two of those sources indicated that the company raised close to $250 million.
Sources reveal that Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia were the primary backers in this round. Fal did not reply to inquiries for comment, while both Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins also declined to provide statements.
This latest investment comes less than a quarter after Fal revealed a $125 million Series C round at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Meritech. At that point, the company’s revenue surpassed $95 million and its platform had attracted more than two million developers, according to Todd Jackson, a partner at First Round Capital, on LinkedIn. That marked a dramatic increase from the previous year, when TechCrunch reported Fal’s annualized recurring revenue (ARR) was $10 million with 500,000 developers using the platform.
Because Fal delivers the foundational infrastructure for both multimodal and media-specific AI models, its rapid expansion is closely linked to the growing adoption of apps built on its platform. Demand for multimodal AI, particularly in video, is soaring—demonstrated by the meteoric rise of OpenAI’s Sora, which climbed the U.S. App Store charts even faster than ChatGPT. The overwhelming interest in apps like Sora highlights the significant market opportunity for Fal’s solutions.
Fal claims to offer developers access to more than 600 models spanning image, video, audio, and 3D, and says its cloud infrastructure features thousands of Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs optimized for fast inference. The company also provides tools for model customization. Developers can access these models through APIs, a flexible serverless platform, or enterprise-grade compute clusters. While there are other players in the model and app hosting space—such as Microsoft, Google, and
CoreWeave—venture capitalists like Jackson point to Fal’s dedicated focus on media and multimodal AI as its key differentiator.
Fal’s user base includes everyone from solo developers to major corporations like Adobe, Canva, Perplexity, and Shopify. Popular applications include generating media for advertising, online retail, and gaming.
The company was established 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. Gur and Yurtseven identified a gap in personalized multimedia creation. While many in the industry focused on large language models, they concentrated on making Stable Diffusion faster and more scalable, later expanding to support a wide range of models.
According to PitchBook, Fal had previously raised close to $200 million. Its roster of investors includes Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Notable Capital, First Round Capital, Unusual Ventures, and Village Global.