Sources: Multimodal AI startup Fal.ai has already achieved a valuation of $4 billion

Fal.ai, a startup that gives image, video and audio artificial intelligence models to developers, has closed a recent round valuing the company at greater than $4 billion, 4 people familiar with the deal said. Two people said the company has raised about $250 million.

According to our sources, the essential investors in this round are Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia. Fal didn’t reply to a request for comment. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins declined to comment.

The recent round will happen lower than three months after Fal announced its $125 million Series C win Valued at $1.5 billion hosted by Meritech. At the time, the company’s revenues topped $95 million and its platform was used by greater than two million developers, wrote Todd Jackson, a partner at First Round Capital. LinkedIn. That’s a huge increase from a yr ago, when TechCrunch reported Fal had $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and 500,000 developers.

Because Fal provides an infrastructure layer for multimodal AI models (in addition to media-specific models), the company’s explosive growth is directly tied to user adoption of applications built on top of it. Multimodal AI is currently in high demand, especially in video, as evidenced by the growing popularity of OpenAI-powered Sora software, which has climbed to the top of the US App Store even faster than ChatGPT. The enormous consumer demand for applications like Sora highlights the market potential of Fal’s offering.

Fal provides developers with over 600 image, video, audio and 3D models, it claims, boasting that its cloud comprises hundreds of Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs and is tuned for fast inference. It also offers tools for customizing models. Its offerings include API access hosted on a flexible serverless offering or via enterprise-ready compute clusters. While there are definitely other competitors offering model and application hosting services (Microsoft, Google,
CoreWeave, to call a few), Fal’s unique focus on media and multimodality is its competitive selling point, say VC investors like Jackson.

The startup’s clients range from individual developers to large corporations, including Adobe, Canva, Perplexity and Shopify. Some of the popular use cases include creating media for promoting, e-commerce, and gaming content.

The startup was founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur, a former Coinbase machine learning leader and Oracle engineer, and Gorkem Yurtseven, who was previously a developer at Amazon. Gur and Yurtseven saw an opportunity for personalized media generation. While other technologists focused on LLM, they focused on optimizing Stable Diffusion for speed and scale and have since expanded to host many other such models.

Fal previously raised nearly $200 million, based on PitchBook data. The company’s current investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Notable Capital, First Round Capital, Unusual Ventures and Village Global.