fal is Generative Media - Our $125M Series C
Today, we are excited to share that we’ve raised a $125M Series C led by Meritech, with new participation from Salesforce Ventures, Shopify Ventures, and the Google AI Futures Fund. Our existing partners Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, a16z, Notable Capital, First Round Capital, Unusual Ventures, and Village Global, also joined the round. We are welcoming Arsham Memarzadeh to our Board.
We want to take this moment to tell you how we got here and where we are going.
We started our journey in 2021 with the vision of scaling compute for Python. We were directionally correct; inference was the next big thing for compute but we didn’t know our specific opportunity would be AI-generated media.
At the time, we had an extremely technical team that was absolutely in love with this new technology: AI models that can create images. Toward the end of 2022, DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion were indistinguishable from magic for us.
However, these models had a major flaw: they were extremely slow. And you know what extremely technical teams hate the most? Slow stuff.
We spent days and nights trying to optimize Stable Diffusion. Relentlessly. We showed our cool tech to people. They loved it. We were on top of independent benchmarks over and over. We let other people access these models through our platform, and we saw their usage grow and grow.
We saw our customers building amazing new use cases: the next generation of image-editing apps, social networks, advertising platforms, you name it. We started to realize that this technology was going to be much bigger than image generation. We believed that, in the not-so-distant future, all content we consume would be AI-generated. We started calling ourselves the Generative Media Platform for Developers.
In February 2024, the OpenAI Sora teaser shocked the whole world, or at least those who were watching this space closely. We felt vindicated. We felt that by the end of the year we would see video models in production. We called 2025, the year of AI Video. We worked very hard on making video models fast so our customers could once again experience that fal is synonymous with fast. We started to scale our team to better support our customers.
We suspected 2025 was going to be big, but we had no idea it would be this big.
In the last 12 months, we saw our revenue 60x. Our early bet and laser focus in this space paid off. As models get better, we are seeing more and more startups, as well as enterprises, adopt this technology. And even then, we are very certain that it is still early for Generative Media models.
To be able to handle this tremendous growth, we are doubling down in all areas of our business. More support, more go-to-market and a larger GPU fleet. We are also making our world-class infrastructure available to every team deploying custom generative media models: We call it fal Serverless.
Our new goal is to be synonymous with Generative Media and with this milestone, we are one step closer to that.
We would like to thank our amazing team that wakes up every day and puts in their 1000% to push the frontier in this space, as well as our customers who put their trust in us.
If you feel excited about our mission, we are hiring: fal.ai/careers
Onwards!
Burkay & Gorkem