Fal raises $1.3 billion at a $16 billion valuation to expand inference
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
Running trained models is becoming a major market of its own: investors are funding the capacity that services already need to keep up with demand.
Bessemer Venture Partners led the Series F round with participation from Nvidia, Sound Ventures, T. Rowe Price, and other investors. The company's valuation doubled from $8 billion in April. Fal simultaneously announced its earlier Series E round led by Sequoia: the two rounds brought in a combined $1.65 billion. The startup runs trained image, video, and audio models for developers. According to Bloomberg, its annualized revenue surpassed $800 million, and in the summer the company had to limit customer requests because of insufficient capacity. The money will go toward computing infrastructure and expanding the 185-person team.
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