Fal doubles valuation to $16B on $1.3B round led by Bessemer
TL;DR
- Fal raised $1.3B at a $16B valuation led by Bessemer Venture Partners, double the $8B mark it carried in April.
- A person familiar with the business told Bloomberg Fal reached $800M in annualized revenue earlier this year.
- CEO Burkay Gur said capacity ran out this summer and Fal had to rate-limit customers; proceeds go to more compute.
Fal has raised $1.3 billion in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners at a $16 billion valuation, double the $8 billion valuation it carried in April, Bloomberg reported. The round closed in October, and Nvidia, T. Rowe Price, Sound Ventures and HOF Capital also took part.
Fal hosts image, video and audio AI models for developers. Inference, in its sense, means running those models after they have been trained, not training them. A person familiar with the business told Bloomberg the company has hit $800 million in annualized revenue earlier this year.
Growth has outrun capacity. "We hit a point in summer where we were not able to serve our customers and had to rate limit them," CEO Burkay Gur told Bloomberg, adding that the fresh capital will go toward buying more computing power.
Fal was co-founded in 2021 by Gur, previously a machine learning leader at Coinbase and an Oracle engineer, and Gorkem Yurtseven, previously a developer at Amazon. The round lands in a dense stretch of inference-economics coverage on our side — 122 inference stories tracked in the last 90 days, including recent serving-cost comparisons between AMD and Nvidia hardware.
Originally reported by bloomberg.com
Read the original article →Original headline: AI inference startup Fal raises $1.3B led by Bessemer at a $16B valuation, up from $8B in April