Why We Doubled Down: fal's $125M Series C and the Future of Generative Media
Just six months after leading fal's Series B, we're thrilled to announce our continued investment in fal's $125M Series C amidst breathtaking momentum.
July 31, 2025
Just six months after leading fal's Series B, we're thrilled to announce our continued investment in fal's $125M Series C amidst breathtaking momentum.
"We get surprised every morning when we go into our Slack and we're looking at new support inquiries, and we start seeing household brands. We're like, 'What? They want to use fal?'"
That's how fal co-founder Burkay Gur recently described the rocket ship his company has become. Just six months after Notable Capital led fal’s Series B, we're thrilled to announce our continued investment in fal's $125M Series C, led by Meritech with strategic participation from Shopify Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.
fal’s momentum, architected by co-founders Burkay and Gorkem Yurtseven, has been breathtaking: fal has doubled their ARR since February, and grown revenue more than 50% in the last two months alone. The generative media platform now supports more than 1 million developers and 100+ enterprise customers, serving billions of AI-generated assets each month. But even more telling than the scale is the diversity—from Quora and Canva to Foster + Partners and Perplexity, the use cases span every industry where visual content matters.
When we first invested, we were excited about fal's technical excellence in GPU optimization and model inference. Fal consistently runs at up to 10x lower latency than competitors, processing over 100 million inference requests daily with 99.99% uptime. Unlike traditional AI infrastructure, fal’s proprietary inference engine was built from the ground up for the complexity of real-time video.
That foundation remains crucial—but fal has evolved far beyond just fast inference. What sets fal apart is their full-stack approach.
As Burkay described their technical architecture on The New Stack podcast: "Because we own the whole experience for the developers, we have to think of speed at every level. If you think of the whole journey of this request, it's actually going through a lot of different systems. So inference optimization is just one part, but there's also regional GPUs, routing, custom CDN, content delivery—all of those things are built."
fal’s full-stack approach has enabled them to move at the speed of the market, consistently shipping access to new models at blazing fast inference speeds within hours of the model’s release.
One of the most impressive aspects of fal's evolution is how they've built a developer-first product that's also accessible to non-technical users. "One of the best things we did is we've built a developer product, but it's also extremely easy to use for developers when they're not developing, or non-developers when they're just trying to play with a model. Turns out, if you build a really good developer product, you also have built a good product for non-technical people," Burkay said.
This dual accessibility has opened up new market segments. The strategic investments from Shopify Ventures and Salesforce Ventures signal the growing importance of generative media in commerce and enterprise workflows—areas where the combination of technical depth and ease of use becomes critical.
What excites us most about this next chapter is fal's expanded vision. They're not just hosting models; they're building the infrastructure for the entire generative media ecosystem. This includes:
As Burkay put it on The New Stack: "We want to be the place to go for developers. It doesn't matter whether they're open or closed models—they should be on fal. If you want every developer to get value here, we need to go and figure out how to get these models onto the platform."
Six months ago, we invested in fal because we believed in the team’s technical excellence and the generative media opportunity. Today, we're doubling down because the fal team has proven they can execute at scale, at a relentless speed, while expanding their vision to match the size of the opportunity.
As we look ahead, we see fal positioned to be the defining platform for the generative media era. In the same way that AWS became the default choice for cloud infrastructure, fal is building the foundation that will power the next decade of creative content.
Better models are coming, but they’re not enough—it will be about who has control over what gets generated, how it's shaped, and how quickly it reaches the world. fal is building that future, and we're excited to continue the journey with Burkay, Gorkem and the team.
To hear more about fal's technical architecture and market vision, check out Glenn Solomon's recent joint interview with Burkay on The New Stack Agents podcast.
