Fal raises $1.3B at a $16B valuation, double its April mark

Fal, the San Francisco startup that runs AI image, video and audio models for developers, has raised $1.3 billion at a $16 billion valuation, according to TechCrunch. Fal announced a Series E and a Series F together in a post on its blog, and the graphic on that post puts the combined total at $1.65 billion.

The valuation is double the $8 billion that TechCrunch, citing Bloomberg, says fal was valued at in April. That is a fast climb for a company that sells inference, which means running models that someone else trained.

Who is behind the fal valuation

Fal says the Series E was led by Sequoia Capital and closed earlier this year. The Series F was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with NVIDIA as a strategic investor. TechCrunch adds that Sound Ventures and T. Rowe Price also took part. Fal's own post gives no round sizes or valuation, so those figures rest on TechCrunch's reporting.

What fal sells

Fal hosts models for generating images, video and audio and lets developers call them through an API. TechCrunch reports the company passed $800 million in annualized revenue earlier in 2026, a figure it attributes to Bloomberg. Fal has not confirmed that number in the post we read. Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven founded the company in 2021.

TechCrunch says demand is strong, especially from customers using open-source models. It also lists Baseten, Fireworks AI and Modal as fast-growing rivals, and notes that margins across the group stay thin because compute is expensive.

What the money is for

Fal says the two rounds will fund its ecosystem work through 2027 and give the team room for new research and creative formats. It gives no breakdown.

Two things to watch: whether fal publishes its own revenue and round figures, and how it spends the NVIDIA relationship, since NVIDIA also supplies the chips every inference company depends on.