Why We Invested In fal.ai
February 12, 2025
In a few short years, generative media models have revolutionized content creation. What once took entire teams —drafting briefs, designing layouts, and managing shoots—can now be done in seconds with AI. This shift removes barriers between ideas and execution. Where creative teams were once slowed by the logistics of production, generative AI unlocks rapid experimentation, freeing up human talent to focus on strategy, storytelling, and the work that demands a human touch. Creating an unlimited number of images and videos is now as simple as asking a model, freeing up creative talent in areas such as music, fashion, gaming and film to spend time and energy on the work that needs it most.
With this backdrop, we’re incredibly excited at Notable Capital to announce that we’re leading fal’s series B financing. We’ve been tracking fal’s progress for some time and are proud to partner with founders Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven as they build the leading infrastructure provider powering the generative AI models behind new media experiences embedded in products from Quora, Canva, Perplexity and many others.
Developers are the architects of this change, enabling the platforms that support creatives, artists, and everyday people to generate and augment media by building on top of dozens of new generative models. The key for developers is speed and efficiency. The faster and cheaper models can generate content, the richer an experience developers can offer to their end users, whether they be fashion designers tinkering with new styles or consumers making their own emojis.
fal is helping developers build transformational products with generative content models by offering the fastest, most efficient inference pipelines. Over the last year, we’ve seen companies transform their applications by easily incorporating the best generative models using fal. Like the best developer tools, fal reduces tradeoffs for its users,improving end-user experiences. fal consistently runs at up to 10x lower latency than competitors. It also offers better developer experience, greater model variety, and useful higher-level abstractions like efficient fine-tuning pipelines. The AI engineering community is taking note. In a rapidly changing model landscape, fal has become the go-to place for developers to build on the latest models, processing over 100 million inference requests daily with 99.99% uptime.
fal founders Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven are unmatched in both inference expertise and their drive to enable developers and model builders. Burkay was previously the first ML hire at Coinbase, where he built their ML infrastructure platform. Gorkem comes from AWS, where he worked on Sagemaker and other developer tools. Leveraging their AI experience, they’ve built an intensely focused team that rapidly supports every new model with best-in-class price and latency, while eliminating technical barriers to creating responsive and immersive experiences.
As the challenge of serving generative models has gotten more complex, fal has widened the gap versus its competition. We have seen fal become a critical component of some of the most interesting, AI-centric apps from both new companies like Perplexity and existing giants like Canva, propelling the company to 20x revenue growth since their Series A. In 2024, we witnessed the transformation of image generation. We believe video will now take center stage, and fal is becoming the critical inference layer between model providers and AI developers, powering the apps and experiences that will define the next decade.
We couldn’t miss an opportunity to partner with Burkay and Gorkem. As generative AI evolves, fal is not just keeping pace—it’s shaping the future. As creativity explodes across generative models, fal’s infrastructure will ensure that ideas aren’t limited by technology—but accelerated by it. We can’t wait to see what’s next for Burkay, Gorkem and the entire fal team, and we’re excited to be joining this team on their journey!
