Exclusive: Sources: Multimodal AI startup Fal.ai already raised at $4B+ valuation

Fal.ai, a startup that hosts image, video, and audio AI models for developers, has closed a new round valuing the company at over $4 billion, four people familiar with the deal said. The company raised approximately $250 million, two of the people said.

Major investors in the round are Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, according to our sources. Fal didn’t respond to a request for comment. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins declined to comment.

The new round is coming less than three months after Fal announced a $125 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation led by Meritech. At that time, the company’s revenue crossed $95 million and its platform was used by over 2 million developers, Todd Jackson, a partner at First Round Capital, wrote on LinkedIn. That was massive growth from a year ago, when TechCrunch reported Fal had $10 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR) and 500,000 developers.

Since Fal provides the infrastructure layer for multimodal AI models (as well as media-specific ones), the company’s explosive growth is directly tied to the user adoption of applications built on top of it. And multimodal AI is in heavy demand right now, especially video, as evidenced by the soaring popularity of OpenAI’s Sora, which surged to the top of the U.S. App Store even faster than ChatGPT did. This massive consumer demand for applications like Sora underscores the market potential of Fal’s offering.

Fal provides developers with over 600 image, video, audio, and 3D models, it says, and boasts that its cloud has thousands of Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs and is fine-tuned for speedy inference. It offers tools for customizing models as well. Its offerings include access via API, hosted via a flexible serverless offering, or via enterprise-ready compute clusters. While there are certainly other competitors offering model and app hosting services (Microsoft, Google, CoreWeave, to name a few), Fal’s singular focus on media and multimodal is its competitive selling point, VCs like Jackson say.

The startup’s customers range from individual developers to large companies, including Adobe, Canva, Perplexity, and Shopify. Some of the popular use cases include media creation for advertising, e-commerce, and gaming content.

The startup was co-founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur, a former Coinbase machine learning leader and Oracle engineer, and Gorkem Yurtseven, who was previously a developer at Amazon. Gur and Yurtseven saw an opportunity for personalized multimedia generation. While other technologists pursued LLMs, they zeroed in on optimizing Stable Diffusion for speed and scale, and have since expanded to hosting many other such models.

Fal previously raised nearly $200 million, according to PitchBook data. The company’s existing investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Notable Capital, First Round Capital, Unusual Ventures, and Village Global.