San Francisco-based startup Fal is responsible for hosting and operating AI video, image, and audio models. The company raised $1.3 billion in its latest round of financing, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Nvidia, Sound Ventures, and T. Rowe Price. According to Bloomberg, this deal has valued Fal at $16 billion, doubling its valuation of $8 billion from April.

The startup also announced two rounds of financing, Series E and Series F, stating that a total of $1.65 billion was raised from these two rounds. (The earlier round was led by Sequoia.)

The latest round of financing (Series F) occurred at a time when demand for inference services has surged. Inference services refer to the process of running already trained (AI) models to generate outputs, which are particularly favored by customers that rely on open-source models. Bloomberg reported that (Fal)'s annual revenue earlier this year had exceeded 800 million US dollars.

Companies that provide inference services, including Baseten, Fireworks AI, and Modal, are also growing rapidly and have completed large-scale financings at higher valuations. However, several individuals familiar with the financial situations of these inference companies stated that due to the high costs of purchasing or leasing computing power, their gross profit margins remain relatively low.

Fal was co-founded by Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven. Gur used to be the person in charge of machine learning at Coinbase and also worked as an engineer at Oracle; Yurtseven was previously a developer for Amazon.