Fal.ai, which hosts media-generating AI models, raises $23M from a16z and others
Fal.ai, a dev-focused platform for AI-generated audio, video, and images, today revealed that it’s raised $23 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Black Forest Labs co-founder Robin Rombach, and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas.
It’s a two-round deal: $14 million of Fal’s total came from a Series A tranche led by Kindred Ventures; the remaining $9 million is from a previously unannounced, a16z-led seed round.
Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven co-launched Fal (short for “Features and labels”) in 2021. Yurtseven previously worked at Amazon as a software dev, while Gur, an ex-Oracle engineer, led machine learning development at Coinbase for several years.
While hacking together side projects during the pandemic, Gur and Yurtseven, longtime friends, realized the growing demand for AI cloud infrastructure — particularly infrastructure to run generative AI models.
“The big bet was that the nascent space of generative media was about to change all media consumed,” Gur told TechCrunch. “The timing worked out perfectly, because there were some breakthrough models that were released right after Fal started.”
