fal just raised $1.3 billion at a $16 billion valuation.
Six months ago it was worth $8 billion. Announced together with an earlier round, it brings the total to $1.65 billion:
a $350M Series E led by Sequoia in April, at $8B
a $1.3B Series F led by Bessemer, with Nvidia, T. Rowe Price and Sound Ventures
around $800M in annualized revenue, up from $400M in March (as reported by The Information)
What they do? When an app generates a video, an image or a voice with AI, a model has to run somewhere on expensive GPUs. Most companies don’t want to run hundreds of models themselves, so they call fal: one API that runs more than 600 image, video and audio models, from Google’s Veo and Kling to open models anyone can download.
Adobe, Canva and Shopify run production traffic on it. Demand grew so fast that this summer fal had to rate limit its own customers.
→ fal gets paid for every image and every second of video its customers generate
📚 In this newsletter, I break down the moves that took fal from a data company that earned nothing in its first year to a $16 billion valuation, with clips from the founders’ own interviews.
Inside you will find:
How to Pick the Market Everyone Else Is Ignoring
A year with zero revenue, 19 seconds per image and the day they said no to LLMs.How to Turn Speed Into a Wedge With Only 8 GPUs
Why video needs 10,000x the compute of text and how they made every model 3-4x faster.How to Build the Infrastructure Hyperscalers Won’t Give You
Their own orchestrator, their own cache, 35 data centers and day-zero launches on Nvidia.How to Turn a Model API Into a Two-Sided Marketplace
Kling, exclusive launch windows and why the top 100 customers use 14 models each.How 28 Engineers Learned to Sell to Adobe, Canva and Shopify
Founder-led sales, a Slack channel with every customer and the team that tells them which model to use.The Team Behind fal
Coinbase, Amazon, a Twitter DM to a Python core maintainer and two layers of management.The Road to $16B
Five rounds that each doubled the valuation, the revenue curve and the meme that went viral.
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