fal

BREAKING: @fal just raised $1.65 BILLION across its Series E & F › Series E led by @sequoia › Series F led by @BessemerVP I sat down w/ Co-Founders: CEO Burkay Gür (@burkaygur) & CTO Görkem Yurtseven (@gorkem) to discuss the explosive growth of generative media, which they believe is 1 of only 3 major product-market fits in AI, alongside search & coding agents. Founded in 2021 by former Coinbase & Amazon engineers, fal powers the infrastructure behind AI image, video, audio & 3D models, serving developers, studios & model labs. fal /faɫ/ · noun · Turkish Pronounced approximately “fahl” (rhymes with doll in many American accents) Definitions 1. Fortune-telling; divination. The practice of predicting future events, particularly through interpreting coffee grounds, cards, or other symbols. 2. Fortune; fate; luck. A person's destiny or prospects. 3. Omen; augury. A sign interpreted as indicating what may happen in the future. A few highlights: ›› Professional users spend $10K–$20K/month generating AI media. ›› Video reached ~70% of fal's revenue before image editing drove a resurgence, bringing the mix back to 50/50. ›› Demand continued growing even as premium AI video model prices jumped more than 10X. ›› fal has scaled to ~150 employees with just 2 reporting levels. ›› Compute shortages are shaping model launches, while the founders believe AI's strongest margins will be captured by infrastructure providers rather than applications. "AI really has 3 product market fits. One of them is search. The other really clear one that's growing really fast now is coding agents. & the third one is, we believe, generative media." We recorded at Dalida in San Francisco & got into fal's evolution from Python infrastructure, the economics of AI inference, Hollywood, robotics, world models & the future of compute. This was SO much fun!! 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Burkay Gur & Gorkem Yurtseven, Co-Founders at fal (00:48) Why fal stopped chasing headlines (03:15) Why generative media is AI’s next big market (04:51) The infinite demand for AI videos (09:35) The future of AI-generated ads (13:19) How fal pivoted into generative media (18:02) Hiring people who live and breathe AI (23:01) Where AI meets Hollywood (24:29) From friends to Co-Founders (27:48) What a “Super IC” actually is (35:58) The hardest part of staying at the frontier (37:42) Why compute is the bottleneck for new models (41:55) Why AI models have such weird names (43:56) The story behind the name fal (45:12) Why open source isn't going anywhere (49:02) "AI has had zero impact on Hollywood" (53:39) Waiting for AI's Toy Story moment (56:58) Why Jack Dorsey is underrated (58:55) Why the application layer has no margins