The model hosting platform fal.ai, known for its high-performance infrastructure for hosting, developing, and fine-tuning image, video and audio generative AI models, is said to have raised more than $250 million at a valuation that exceeds $4 billion by sources close to the deal. Some sources have also named Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia as major investors in the round. This raising effort comes less than three months after fal.ai closed a $125 million Series C funding round led by Meritech, which brought the startup's total raised capital to $197 million and counted with the participation of Salesforce Ventures, Shopify Ventures and Google AI Futures Fund.

As a model hosting platform, fal.ai provides developers with several options to host and access image, video, audio, and 3D AI models. The startup delivers API access to over 600 models, including everything from Google's popular Veo 3.1 and Nano Banana to offerings from Black Forest Labs, Kling and Qwen. In addition to API access to generative models, fal.ai also offers serverless hosting and dedicated enterprise-grade compute clusters. The company's cloud infrastructure includes thousands of Nvidia H100 and H200 GPUs optimized, which it says have been optimized for fast inference.

The startup's explosive growth reflects surging demand for multimodal AI applications, particularly video generation tools like OpenAI's Sora, which recently topped the U.S. App Store in record time, rising to the #1 spot in less time it took ChatGPT to achieve the same feat. And while there is no shortage of companies providing app and model hosting infrastructure, Fal's exclusive focus on media and multimodal models has become its key differentiator.

Founded in 2021 by former Coinbase machine learning leader Burkay Gur and ex-Amazon developer Gorkem Yurtseven, Fal counts Adobe, Canva, Perplexity, and Shopify among its customers, serving use cases spanning advertising, e-commerce, and gaming content creation.