Fal, a San Francisco startup that hosts and runs AI video, image, and audio models, has raised $1.3 billion in a funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Nvidia, Sound Ventures, and T. Rowe Price also participating. The deal values the company at $16 billion, double its $8 billion valuation from April, according to Bloomberg.

The startup announced its Series E and F rounds simultaneously, noting a combined $1.65 billion raised across both. Sequoia led the earlier round.

The Series F round arrives as demand climbs for inference services - running already-trained AI models to generate outputs - particularly from customers using open source models. Fal surpassed $800 million in annualized revenue earlier this year, Bloomberg reported.

Other inference providers, including Baseten, Fireworks AI, and Modal, have also grown quickly and raised large rounds at higher valuations. But their gross margins remain thin due to the high cost of buying or leasing compute, according to several people familiar with inference companies' financials.

Fal was co-founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur, a former Coinbase machine learning leader and Oracle engineer, and Gorkem Yurtseven, previously a developer at Amazon.

Source: TechCrunch