fal secured $23M to grow its hosting platform for media generation models
fal has raised $23 million in funding to accelerate its generative media model hosting platform, which offers high-performance inference APIs and solutions that have attracted a rapidly growing user base of developers and enterprises.
Model hosting platform fal (short for Features and Labels) has recently shared it raised $23 million in seed and Series A funding. The $14 million Series A round was led by Kindred Ventures, and supported by a remarkable selection of investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, and angels Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Balaji Srinivasan, and Julien Chaumond. fal's $9 million seed funding was provided by Andreessen Horowitz and Village Global.
fal is looking to become a leading platform for enterprises that want to leverage media generation models at scale. To do this, the company has two offerings: inference APIs granting access to open-source models, and a privately managed service for research labs. fal as one of the first to host Black Forest Labs’ Flux, which now powers the image-generation capabilities of xAI/X's Grok.
Even if the model hosting space is not without competition—CoreWeave offers services similar to fal's—the latter has attracted enterprises, research labs like PlayHT, and some leading consumer AI companies including Perplexity, Photoroom, and Freepik. Moreover, fal has demonstrated consistent growth, already boasting milestones such as reaching 500,000 developers on the platform, powering the generation of 50 million daily images, videos, or audio streams, achieving 10x year-on-year revenue growth, and earning the title of fastest Whisper, Flux and Stable Diffusion per the results of independent benchmarks.
