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 more than $4 billion, four people familiar with the deal said. The company has raised about $250 million, the two said.

Lead investors in the round are Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, according to our sources. Fal did not respond to a request for comment. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins declined to comment.

The new round comes less than three months after Fall announced a $125 million Series C $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 two million developers, writes Todd Jackson, a partner at First Round Capital. LinkedIn. That was a huge growth from a year ago, when TechCrunch reported Fal had $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and 500,000 developers.

Because Fal provides the infrastructure layer for multimodal AI models (as well as media-specific ones), the company’s explosive growth is directly linked to user adoption of applications built on top of it. And multimodal AI is in huge demand right now, especially video, as evidenced by the growing popularity of OpenAI’s Sora, which even reached the top of the US App Store. Faster than ChatGPT This widespread consumer demand for applications like Kaye Sora underscores the market potential of Fall’s offerings.

Fal provides developers with more than 600 images, videos, audio and 3D models, it says, boasting that its cloud contains thousands of Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs and fine-tuned for fast estimation. It also provides tools for customizing models. Its offerings include access via API, a flexible serverless offering or hosting via enterprise-ready compute clusters. While other competitors are certainly offering models and app hosting services (Microsoft, Google,
CoreWeave, to name a few), Fall’s singular focus on media and multimodal is its competitive selling point, say VCs like Jackson.

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

The startup was co-founded in 2021 by Burke Gur, a former Coinbase machine learning leader and Oracle engineer, and Gorkem Yortseven, formerly a developer at Amazon. Gur and Yortseven saw an opportunity for the personalized multimedia generation. While other technicians pursued LLM, they zeroed in on optimizing stable diffusion for speed and scale, and have since expanded to host many other such models.

Fall previously raised about $200 million, according to Pitchbook data. The company’s existing investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Notable Capital, First Round Capital, Uncommon Ventures and Village Global.