Fal, a San Francisco-based startup that hosts and runs AI video, image, and audio models, raised US$1.3 billion in a series F round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

The deal values Fal at US$16 billion, double its April valuation of US$8 billion. Fal said it raised a combined US$1.65 billion across its series E and series F rounds. Sequoia led series E, while Nvidia, Sound Ventures, and T. Rowe Price joined series F.

The company said developers use its platform to generate images, video, and audio through managed model application programming interfaces.

The latest round comes as demand rises for inference services, which run trained AI models to generate outputs. Fal surpassed US$800 million in annualized revenue earlier this year.

Other inference companies, including Fireworks AI, Baseten, and Modal, are also growing quickly and raising large funding rounds. But people familiar with inference startups’ finances said gross margins remain thin because buying or leasing computing power is expensive.

Fal was founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur, a former Coinbase machine learning leader and Oracle engineer, and Gorkem Yurtseven, a former Amazon developer.

🔗 Source: TechCrunch