Generative media inference startup fal raises $1.3B at a $16B valuation

Generative media inference startup fal has secured $1.3 billion in funding at a $16 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported. The funds will be allocated towards enhancing computing power and expanding the workforce beyond its current 185 employees. Fal offers a cloud platform enabling developers to access various image, video, and audio generation models through a unified application programming interface.

Notable users of these models include entertainment studios, advertising agencies, and game developers. The company's research team is also fine-tuning some of these models in-house to improve performance. This year, the focus has been on video generation, with collaboration from both open-source and closed-source developers. Licensing fees or revenue shares are part of some of the deals, according to Bloomberg.

Co-founder and CEO Burkay Gur explained that the round's size is due to increased demand that necessitated rate-limiting customers in the summer. As of now, annualized revenue exceeds $800 million, with Gur stating that pretraining a model of fal's own is not on the near-term agenda. The valuation places fal just behind rival inference provider Fireworks AI Inc., which raised $1.5 billion at a $17.5 billion valuation in July.

Experts from the industry noted that gross margins remain thin due to expensive compute costs. Gur co-founded fal in 2021 with Chief Technology Officer Gorkem Yurtseven, whose background includes leading machine learning work at Coinbase Global Inc. and engineering at Oracle Corp. Yurtseven was previously an Amazon.com Inc. developer.

Bessemer Venture Partners led the Series F round, and Talia Goldberg, co-partner of the fund, has joined the board of Features & Labels Inc., fal's formal name. Nvidia Corp., Sound Ventures, HOF Capital, and T. Rowe Price Group Inc. also participated in the funding. The announcement included a previous round led by Sequoia Capital in April, raising $350 million at an $8 billion valuation.

Combined, the two rounds amount to $1.65 billion. Fal has raised over $1.9 billion overall, with the last investment in December 2022 was $140 million at a $4.5 billion valuation.