Fal, a San Francisco company that hosts and runs AI models for video, images and audio, has raised $1.3 billion in a funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners that values it at $16 billion, TechCrunch reports, citing Bloomberg. That is double the $8 billion valuation it reached in April. Nvidia, Sound Ventures and T. Rowe Price also took part.
Fal announced two rounds together, saying they raised $1.65 billion combined, with Sequoia leading the earlier one. The company passed $800 million in annualised revenue earlier this year, according to Bloomberg. Demand for inference, the work of running already trained models, has grown quickly, particularly among customers using open-source models. Rivals such as Baseten, Fireworks AI and Modal have also raised large sums, though high computing costs keep margins thin. Fal was founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven.
Source: TechCrunch