Sources: Multimedia AI startup Fal.ai has already amassed a $4 billion valuation

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

Major investors in the round include Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, according to our sources. Vale did not respond to a request for comment. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins declined to comment.

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

Because Fal provides the infrastructure layer for multimedia AI models (as well as media-specific models), the company’s explosive growth is directly related to user adoption of applications built on top of it. There is a huge demand for multimedia AI right now, especially video, as evidenced by the growing popularity of OpenAI’s Sora app, which has risen to the top of the US App Store faster than even ChatGPT. This massive consumer demand for apps like Sora underscores the market potential of Fal’s offerings.

Fal provides developers with more than 600 image, video, audio and 3D models, it says, and boasts that its cloud contains thousands of Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs and is fine-tuned for fast inference. It offers tools to customize forms as well. Its offerings include access via API, hosting via an elastic serverless offering, or via enterprise-ready compute clusters. While there are certainly other competitors that offer form and application hosting services (Microsoft, Google,
CoreWeave, to name a few), Fal’s sole focus on media and multimedia is a competitive selling point, venture capitalists like Jackson say.

The startup’s clients range from individual developers to large enterprises including Adobe, Canva, Perplexity, and Shopify. Some common use cases include media creation for advertising, e-commerce, and gaming content.

The startup was founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur, a former machine learning lead at Coinbase and Oracle engineer, and Gorkem Yurtseven, who was previously a developer at Amazon. Gore and Yurtsven saw an opportunity to create custom multimedia. While other technologists were pursuing an MBA, they focused on optimizing Stable Diffusion for speed and scale, and have since expanded to include hosting for many other similar models.

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