Fal.ai, a platform that helps developers create AI-generated audio, video, and images, has just received $23 million in funding from several investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and Black Forest Labs co-founder Robin Rombach.
The funding came in two parts: $14 million from a Series A round led by Kindred Ventures, and $9 million from a previously unannounced seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Fal was co-founded by Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven in 2021. Gur, a former Oracle engineer, used to lead machine learning development at Coinbase, while Yurtseven worked at Amazon as a software developer.
Gur and Yurtseven realized that there was a growing demand for AI cloud infrastructure, especially for generative AI models. They launched Fal to provide a platform for developers to run these models.
Fal offers two main products: a platform for running generative models, and APIs for open-source models that generate images, audio, and video. Fal is unique because of its scalability, according to Gur, who claims that the platform can handle hundreds of millions of requests.
Fal has already attracted many big-name customers, including Perplexity, Photoroom, Freepik, and PlayHT. The company’s annual run rate has grown to nearly $10 million, with 500,000 developers using the platform to generate 50 million images, videos, or audio streams daily.
However, Fal has raised concerns about moderation and IP liability. Gur says that Fal leaves moderation decisions up to the companies developing models on the platform, but this may not be enough to protect customers from potential legal issues.
