Fal raises $1.3 billion, doubling its valuation to $16 billion

Fal said it raised $1.3 billion in its latest round, with participation from Nvidia, Sound Ventures and T. Rowe Price. The company announced its Series E and F rounds together, with a combined $1.65 billion raised across both, and the Series F is the most recent. Sequoia led the earlier round.

The funding comes as demand for inference, the process of running a trained AI model to generate outputs, keeps rising, especially among customers using open-source models. Bloomberg reported that Fal passed $800 million in annualized revenue earlier this year.

Other inference providers, including Baseten, Fireworks AI and Modal, are also growing quickly and raising large rounds, though their gross margins remain thin because of the high cost of buying or leasing compute, according to people familiar with their finances.

Inference providers are attracting large amounts of capital, which points to continued competition among hosted model platforms for agent workloads. Developers choosing an inference vendor may want to weigh pricing stability, since the source says margins across this group are thin because compute is expensive.