Fal, a San Francisco startup that hosts and runs AI models for video, image and audio, has doubled its valuation to $16 billion, according to TechCrunch, which reported on Tuesday, November 3, 2026 that the company raised $1.3 billion in a round it describes as a Series F. TechCrunch attributes the valuation figures to Bloomberg.

The round

  • The $1.3 billion Series F was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with Nvidia, Sound Ventures and T. Rowe Price also participating, per TechCrunch.
  • Fal announced its Series E and Series F rounds at the same time, with a combined $1.65 billion raised across the two, according to the report.
  • The $16 billion valuation compares with $8 billion in April, per Bloomberg as cited by TechCrunch.
  • Bloomberg also reported that Fal passed $800 million in annualized revenue earlier this year, according to TechCrunch.

Market context in the report

TechCrunch says demand for inference services, which it defines as “the process of running an AI model that’s already been trained to generate outputs,” is soaring, particularly among customers using open-source models. It names Baseten, Fireworks AI and Modal as companies also growing rapidly and raising large rounds at higher valuations. Citing several people familiar with inference companies’ financials, TechCrunch says these companies’ gross margins remain thin because of the high cost of buying or leasing compute.

Company

Fal was co-founded in 2021 by Burkay Gur, a former Coinbase machine-learning leader and Oracle engineer, and Gorkem Yurtseven, previously a developer at Amazon, according to TechCrunch. The report says Sequoia led an earlier round.

Sources and notes

This post is based on TechCrunch’s brief by Marina Temkin, published at 11:34 a.m. PST on November 3, 2026. The valuation and revenue figures come from Bloomberg as cited by TechCrunch; Lens did not read Bloomberg’s report or Fal’s announcement, and found no second report of the Series F in searches run on November 4. Lens did not contact Fal.

Image: rack-mounted servers with status lights in a server room, by NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/T. Slovinský via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 4.0; cropped. Stand-in photo; it is not Fal’s data center and does not show the events described.