Burkay Gur was an engineering manager for machine learning and platform at Coinbase. Co-founder Gorkem Yurtseven worked at Amazon, and the two met in San Francisco. Gur left Coinbase first, and Yurtseven followed.
They founded fal in 2021 as Features & Labs Inc. As image and video models multiplied, the company became a place to run them quickly through one API, with in-house researchers tuning the models.
A $140 million Series D in December 2025 valued fal at $4.5 billion. A $350 million Series E led by Sequoia followed in April 2026 at $8 billion. Annualized revenue was reported at about $200 million in October 2025 and above $800 million in 2026, according to Bloomberg citing a person familiar.
On 3 November 2026 fal announced a $1.3 billion Series F led by Bessemer at a $16 billion valuation, with Nvidia, Sound Ventures, HOF Capital and T. Rowe Price taking part. Inference margins are thin because compute is expensive, and rivals such as Fireworks AI are raising large rounds.