fal Raises $1.3B Series F at a $16B Valuation, Led by Bessemer

fal raised a $1.3 billion Series F at a $16 billion valuation, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Nvidia participating, Bloomberg reported on November 3. TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE both carried the figure. The valuation is double the $8 billion mark from April. Bessemer said it is leading the Series F. That note does not state the round size or the valuation.

The numbers

• $1.3 billion Series F at $16 billion, as Bloomberg reported. Bessemer led. TechCrunch named Nvidia, Sound Ventures, and T. Rowe Price as participants. SiliconANGLE also named HOF Capital, and it described Nvidia as a strategic investor.
• SiliconANGLE reported that Bessemer partner Talia Goldberg is joining the board of Features & Labels Inc., fal's legal name.
• The April Series E was $350 million at an $8 billion valuation, led by Sequoia, SiliconANGLE reported, citing Bloomberg. TechCrunch said fal announced the Series E and Series F together and put the combined raise at $1.65 billion.
• SiliconANGLE reported a December round of $140 million at a $4.5 billion valuation, and said investors have now put more than $1.9 billion into the company.
• Annualized revenue passed $800 million earlier this year, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE both carried that figure. It is not a company filing.
• SiliconANGLE reported that fal will spend the capital on computing power and on hiring beyond its current 185 employees.

What fal runs

fal hosts image, video, and audio models behind one API. Bessemer said developers reach thousands of models that way, and named Adobe, Canva, Shopify, World Labs, and Amazon among companies that have moved production volume to fal. SiliconANGLE said entertainment studios, advertising agencies, and game developers are among the customers.

Bessemer said fal Research released H3 Max in August, a post-trained version of MiniMax H3, and that last week it partnered with Black Forest Labs on Flux 3 Max. SiliconANGLE, citing Bloomberg, said some post-training deals pay fal licensing fees or a share of revenue. Co-founder and chief executive Burkay Gur told Bloomberg that fal is not planning to pretrain a model of its own in the near term. He did not rule that out later.

"We hit a point in summer where we were not able to serve our customers and had to rate-limit them."

Burkay Gur, co-founder and chief executive of fal, quoted by SiliconANGLE from Bloomberg

Who started it

Gur and chief technology officer Gorkem Yurtseven started fal in 2021. TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE reported that Gur previously led machine learning at Coinbase and worked as an engineer at Oracle, and that Yurtseven was a developer at Amazon. Bessemer said it has backed fal in every round since the Series B.

What we are watching

The round size and valuation in this story come from Bloomberg, as carried by TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE. Bessemer's own note confirms the lead and the product work, and it leaves the price off the page. The $800 million revenue figure is from a person familiar with the matter, not from fal. TechCrunch added that people familiar with inference companies describe gross margins in the sector as thin, because buying or leasing compute is expensive. SiliconANGLE placed fal just behind Fireworks AI, which it said closed $1.5 billion of funding at a $17.5 billion valuation in July.