fal, a company that runs AI image, video and audio models for other businesses, said on Tuesday, Nov. 3, that it has raised $1.65 billion across two funding rounds. Sequoia Capital led the first round, which closed earlier this year. Bessemer Venture Partners led the second, and NVIDIA, the AI chipmaker, invested again.
fal's core business is inference, running a trained model to answer requests, as opposed to training it. A developer sends a request, fal runs the model, and the picture, clip or sound comes back. Bessemer, which led the newer round, says developers reach thousands of models through fal's single connection. It says Adobe, Canva, Shopify and Amazon are among the large companies that have moved some of their everyday work to fal.
fal says studios, ad agencies, online shops, game makers and marketing teams now use image, video and audio models, including fal's own, in the work they deliver. Serving them, it says, takes enough computing power to run the models for that many customers and a team to build what comes next. It says the money pays for its work in 2027 and for new research.
fal has also started improving models that other companies make. In August it released H3 Max, a version of the AI company MiniMax's H3 video model that fal trained further for better quality and tuned to run faster. In October it launched Flux 3 Max with Black Forest Labs, applying the same approach to that company's Flux 3 model.
fal has given only the combined total. According to a news report, the newer round alone raised $1.3 billion, with Sound Ventures and T. Rowe Price also investing, and it values fal at $16 billion, double the $8 billion it was valued at in April. The same report says that earlier this year, fal's sales were running at more than $800 million a year.
A news report says rivals that run models for others, such as Baseten, Fireworks AI and Modal, have also grown fast and raised large sums. It says they keep only a thin slice of each sale as profit, because the computing power they sell is costly to buy or rent. fal has not said whether it makes a profit, or how much of its computing it owns rather than rents.