Fal, a San Francisco company that lets developers run image, video and audio AI models through a single API, has raised $1.3 billion in a Series F at a $16 billion valuation. It was announced on 3 November 2026. Bessemer Venture Partners led it, with Nvidia, Sound Ventures, HOF Capital and T. Rowe Price also taking part, and fal describes Nvidia as a strategic investor. Bessemer partner Talia Goldberg joins the board of Features & Labs Inc., fal's formal corporate name.
The valuation is twice the $8 billion set in April, when a $350 million Series E led by Sequoia Capital closed. Together the two rounds bring in $1.65 billion. Before that, fal raised $140 million at $4.5 billion last December, and its backers have now put in more than $1.9 billion overall. Annualized revenue was reported to have passed $800 million earlier this year, per a person briefed, via Bloomberg. The Information had put it near $400 million in March and about $200 million a year before.
Fal's customers include studios, ad agencies and game developers, with Adobe, Shopify and Canva named. Some model makers pay it licensing fees or a share of revenue, and its researchers tune models after training to run faster, most recently video models. Co-founder and CEO Burkay Gur, formerly a machine-learning lead at Coinbase, started the company in 2021 with Gorkem Yurtseven, a former Amazon developer.
Fal-branded graphic used to illustrate the funding news
Image: SiliconANGLE
Gur said demand had grown faster than the company could supply: at one point in the summer fal could not serve all its customers and had to rate limit them. The new money is meant for compute and for hiring beyond the present 185 staff. Training a fal model from scratch is not an immediate plan, he said, though not ruled out later. Sector sources say inference firms keep thin margins because compute is costly.
About fal
Fal is a San Francisco generative media platform that lets developers run image, video and audio AI models through one API. Gur and Yurtseven, who had worked at Coinbase and Amazon, founded it in 2021.
This is not the first time it has raised money quickly. It took in a $125 million Series C in July 2025, then a $140 million Series D in December 2025 led by Sequoia, with Kleiner Perkins and Nvidia joining, at a $4.5 billion valuation, about three times its July value. That Series D was its third fundraising of 2025, in a year that also included a $250 million raise.
2021
Founded
The round lands among fast-rising rivals. Fireworks AI raised $1.5 billion at $17.5 billion in July, leaving fal just behind it. Baseten went from $5 billion to $13 billion in four months to June, Together AI reached $8.3 billion in July, and Modal is also named among fast-growing providers.
Stock photograph used as TechCrunch's header for its brief
monsitj / Getty Images · Image: TechCrunch
Sources · 3