Fal (styled fal, also known as fal.ai) is a San Francisco-based artificial-intelligence infrastructure company that runs audio, video and image generation models on behalf of developers and enterprises (Source: reuters.com). It was co-founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven (Source: finance.yahoo.com). In September 2026 it was reported to be negotiating a funding round at a target valuation of $15 billion, on annual revenue of $800 million (Source: gurufocus.com).
| Type | Private; AI inference and model-hosting platform for generative media |
| Founded | 2021 |
| Founders | Burkay Gur (CEO), Gorkem Yurtseven |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California |
Snapshot
Valuation
| Date | Valuation | Round / notes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-25 | $15B target, potentially $17–20B (in negotiation; not a completed round) | Reported by The Information, via GuruFocus; the report's headline gives "more than $15 billion" | (Source: gurufocus.com; theinformation.com) |
| 2026 (earlier in the year) | $8B (in talks) | $300M–$350M discussed; reported by The Information, headline and abstract only | (Source: theinformation.com) |
| 2025-12-09 | not disclosed by the company | $140M Series D; new investors Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Nvidia | (Source: blog.fal.ai) |
| 2025-10-21 | more than $4B (reported) | About $250M; Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia named as major investors by people familiar with the deal | (Source: finance.yahoo.com) |
| 2025-07-31 | $1.5B | $125M Series C led by Meritech | (Source: reuters.com) |
Revenue
| Date | Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-25 | Annual revenue | $800M, described as double the level of March 2026 | (Source: gurufocus.com) |
| 2026 (earlier in the year) | Annualized revenue | $400M, described as having doubled | (Source: theinformation.com) |
| 2025-07 | Revenue | more than $95M, with more than 2 million developers on the platform (per First Round Capital partner Todd Jackson) | (Source: finance.yahoo.com) |
| 2024-09 | Annualized recurring revenue | $10M, with 500,000 developers (as reported by TechCrunch at the time) | (Source: finance.yahoo.com) |
Business and products
Fal provides developers with access to more than 600 image, video, audio and 3D models, according to the company, through an API, a serverless hosting offering, or enterprise compute clusters, along with tools for customizing models; it says its cloud runs thousands of Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs and is tuned for fast inference (Source: finance.yahoo.com). Coverage in 2026 described it as an inference service for image and video generation models such as Google's Nano Banana (Source: gurufocus.com).
Its customers range from individual developers to companies including Adobe, Canva, Perplexity and Shopify, with use cases in advertising, e-commerce and gaming content (Source: finance.yahoo.com). Reuters reported in 2025 that most customers use the platform for enterprise purposes, such as generating product images for e-commerce sites or online advertising; Gur told Reuters that "with generative AI, you can create infinite iterations of the same ad" and that "there is incremental value on each asset that you create" (Source: reuters.com).
Funding and valuation
TechCrunch reported in September 2024 that Fal had raised $23 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others (Source: finance.yahoo.com). On July 31, 2025 the company announced a $125 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, led by Meritech with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Shopify Ventures and Google's AI Futures Fund, and from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Notable Capital, First Round Capital, Unusual Ventures and Village Global (Source: reuters.com).
In October 2025 TechCrunch, citing four people familiar with the deal, reported that Fal had closed a round of about $250 million valuing it at more than $4 billion, with Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia as major investors; Fal did not comment (Source: finance.yahoo.com). On December 9, 2025 Fal announced a $140 million Series D, welcoming Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Nvidia as new investors, said its team had grown to 70 people, and launched the fal Generative Media Fund to invest in companies building in the field (Source: blog.fal.ai). The sources reviewed do not reconcile the October report with the December announcement, and the company's post does not state a valuation.
In 2026 The Information reported that Fal was discussing $300 million to $350 million of funding at an $8 billion valuation, with annualized revenue having doubled to $400 million; only the headline and abstract of that report were retrieved (Source: theinformation.com). In September 2026 The Information reported that Fal was negotiating a new round at a target valuation of $15 billion, potentially rising to between $17 billion and $20 billion, with annual revenue of $800 million, double its level in March (Source: gurufocus.com; theinformation.com). The same report described Fireworks AI as considering a round at a $30 billion target, and Baseten and Modal as also in funding discussions (Source: gurufocus.com).
Competition
Fal competes with general cloud and model-hosting providers such as Microsoft, Google and CoreWeave; investors including Jackson cite its focus on media and multimodal models as its distinguishing feature (Source: finance.yahoo.com). The September 2026 report noted that inference providers of this kind have historically operated at margins of around 50%, and that competition from closed-model providers such as OpenAI may put pressure on those margins (Source: gurufocus.com).
People
- Burkay Gur — co-founder and chief executive; previously a machine-learning leader at Coinbase and an engineer at Oracle (Source: finance.yahoo.com).
- Gorkem Yurtseven — co-founder; previously a developer at Amazon (Source: finance.yahoo.com).
Relationships
- related: Fireworks AI, Baseten, Modal — inference providers reported in the same September 2026 funding cycle
- depends-on: Nvidia — GPU supplier and, from the December 2025 Series D, an investor
- related: Inference Economics and Token Pricing