Supporting world-changing startups and kindred spirits who create them. Started in 2014 by @stevejang, joined by @km in ‘18, and focused on the earliest stages.
San Francisco, CA
Joined March 2015
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News! We are proud to share our latest $355M set of funds, combining early stage and early growth.
Kindred Ventures retweeted
Tomorrow in SF: The New Rules of Marketing in the AI Era.
Join us at @KindredVentures HQ with @mascarom (@googlecloud), Bikram Chatterjee (@Yelp), Will Widera (@OpenAI) & our very own, @praneetdutta.
Excited to see everyone there.
Nov 5 · 5:30–8:30 PM PT
RSVP in replies.
Kindred Ventures retweeted
From smartphones to self-driving cars to humanoid robots, Nuro’s @dfergusonnz and @KindredVentures's @stevejang discuss the expanse of physical AI. Listen to Ep3 of Unsupervised wherever you get your podcasts: buzzsprout.com/2654995/episo…
#drivenbynuro #selfdriving #autonomousvehicles #unsupervisedpodcast
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
Kindred Ventures retweeted
Even with billions in your bank account, you can’t buy enough compute to beat the majors head-on. What you can do is extract far more value from every MW you have.
That’s why key theme of 2026 and 2027 for us is post-training. Improving the quality of diffusion models while making them an order of magnitude more efficient.
Today, we’re announcing we raised our Series E & F rounds for a combined total of $1.65B. Our Series E was led by @sequoia and our Series F was led by @BessemerVP with continued investment from @nvidia.
We’re excited to push the boundaries of what’s possible even more next year and this funding will enable the team to build the way we want to.
Kindred Ventures retweeted
when I first met @burkaygur @gorkem and @isidentical 3 years ago, we bonded on inference, diffusion models, and not-yet-arrived gen video models.
starting with just a handful of team members and early customers, they have now accelerated into becoming the trusted foundational infrastructure for the exploding gen media space.
with a concerted move into more compute (1gw 🔜), more model post-training 🪄, and agent tools 🤖, the @fal team is pushing the frontier on many levels for the gen media wave.
congrats to the entire team from all of us at @KindredVentures! we're so inspired by your journey, excited to quintuple down with you in this round, and excited for what's next 🔥🔥🔥
Today, we’re announcing we raised our Series E & F rounds for a combined total of $1.65B. Our Series E was led by @sequoia and our Series F was led by @BessemerVP with continued investment from @nvidia.
We’re excited to push the boundaries of what’s possible even more next year and this funding will enable the team to build the way we want to.
Kindred Ventures retweeted
Today, we’re announcing we raised our Series E & F rounds for a combined total of $1.65B. Our Series E was led by @sequoia and our Series F was led by @BessemerVP with continued investment from @nvidia.
We’re excited to push the boundaries of what’s possible even more next year and this funding will enable the team to build the way we want to.
Kindred Ventures retweeted
cant say this enough: still early days.
a BIG thank you for the team who work their days and nights to get us here.
come be part of a generational team:
fal.ai/careers
Today, we’re announcing we raised our Series E & F rounds for a combined total of $1.65B. Our Series E was led by @sequoia and our Series F was led by @BessemerVP with continued investment from @nvidia.
We’re excited to push the boundaries of what’s possible even more next year and this funding will enable the team to build the way we want to.
Big congratulations to the @fal team on their $1.65B financing led by @sequoia, @BessemerVP, and @nvidia and their phenomenal growth as the foundational inference and post-training platform for the generative media space! Led by @burkaygur and @gorkem, the company hosts and optimizes over 3000 models now, and provides the fastest inference and custom model development for both AI-native builders and Fortune 500 companies.
More on our continued investment and support of their awesome journey:
kindredventures.com/announce…
Kindred Ventures retweeted
thank you @iScienceLuvr for joining our industry news segment with @sophiadew today to talk about holon-s1
holon-s1 from @SophontAI analyzes pathlogy slides to predict molecular insights that improve cancer research. it has also potentially identified a previously unknown biomarker in breast cancer
the model breaks down tumors are doing and where they are vulnerable. can't wait for the era of medical superintelligence and personalized cancer insights
Kindred Ventures retweeted
Tanishq and the entire @SophontAI team is extraordinarily cracked. Excited for them to cure many diseases in the next few years.
Thank you for pushing forward on this important mission.
Cancer patients with the same diagnosis often have very different tumor biology.
Molecular testing can reveal underlying differences, but that's slow and expensive.
Introducing Holon-S1, our platform to predict genes and biomarkers from routine pathology slides.
• beats two other models at predicting spatial gene activity in a controlled comparison
• has identified potentially novel biomarkers in breast cancer and colon cancer
• evaluated across 16 organ types and more than 15 scanners, using slides from both formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded and fresh-frozen tissue.
We believe Holon-S1 has the potential to help researchers find new biomarkers in slides they already have, discover treatment targets, and bring more personalized cancer care within reach!
Kindred Ventures retweeted
Check out Nuro co-founder @zhujiajun's autonomous ride during a recent visit to Japan for a firsthand look at how our universal autonomy platform enables safe self-driving across all roads and all rides.
#drivenbynuro #selfdriving #autonomousvehicles #tokyo
Kindred Ventures retweeted
Congrats @iScienceLuvr and @humanscotti on this insane launch!
Every cancer is, by definition, unique: to understand intratumoral heterogeneity requires genetic expression, biomarkers (that will correlate to therapeutic response), and a patient's unique phenotype.
Holon-S1 from @SophontAI can predict these characteristics, at the per patient level: exposing novel biomarkers for their initial targets -- breast cancer and colon cancer -- too.
Read below.
nitter.cf/iScienceLuvr/status/21…
Cancer patients with the same diagnosis often have very different tumor biology.
Molecular testing can reveal underlying differences, but that's slow and expensive.
Introducing Holon-S1, our platform to predict genes and biomarkers from routine pathology slides.
• beats two other models at predicting spatial gene activity in a controlled comparison
• has identified potentially novel biomarkers in breast cancer and colon cancer
• evaluated across 16 organ types and more than 15 scanners, using slides from both formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded and fresh-frozen tissue.
We believe Holon-S1 has the potential to help researchers find new biomarkers in slides they already have, discover treatment targets, and bring more personalized cancer care within reach!
Kindred Ventures retweeted
Super excited to back the pioneering founders of @dreamlabs_ai on their world action model vision! Congrats to @jang_yoel, @scott_e_reed, @GeYunhao @youliangtan on their:
🔋$90M seed raise with @BCapitalGroup @ACapitalLP @svangel @Unusual_VC @Wing_VC @bznotes @Thom_Wolf @jhong @gharik @adrianaoun and us at @KindredVentures ❤️
🤖 shipping the Dream-1 model via API for general availability. The first World Action Model for public use by developers.
📈 achievement of frontier performance of top scores across the board by @robocurve on difficulty performance, latency, and cost against the SOTA LLMs from @anthropic @OpenAI @GoogleDeepMind 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
Kindred Ventures retweeted
Introducing fal Worlds.
A new way to create and interact with AI-generated worlds in real time.
Build characters, explore environments, direct scenes, and watch worlds respond to your actions as they unfold.
Get hands-on with the latest frontier world models, including LingBot World, H3 Max Director and more.
Kindred Ventures retweeted
Introducing Hugo: the first human companion robot.
At Boston Dynamics, I was Chief Strategy Officer, bringing robots into the real world.
My co-founder, Farbod Farshidian, led research at the RAI Institute.
Together, 15+ years teaching robots to run, jump, and work.
So we asked: what if robots could connect with people?
Hugo runs on the first Vision-Language-Expression (VLE) model.
He links what he sees and hears to movement, expression, and gesture.
He notices you, reads the room, and reacts in real time.
And he's only the first.
Dynamic Creatures is @BostonDynamics' official entertainment and hospitality partner.
We're building a cast of characters with film studios, resorts, and theme parks.
dynamiccreatures.com
Kindred Ventures retweeted
Robots need data that LLMs hadn’t required: perceptual and physical actions, and their consequences, at scale and then verified across various embodied agents.
The team @MeckaAI has tackled this data and deployment problem assuming a multimodal deep learning approach would emerge beyond just VLAs. Since then, the resulting customer growth has been simply incredible.
We’re excited at @kindredventures to double down with @joshavata @jasontheutopian and team in this latest round, and support them on the next chapter of growth! 🦾🦾🦾
👀👀
nobody at sf tech week is talking about models anymore
every conversation was inference, compute, and who owns the physical infra
highest signal room of my week, hosted by @KindredVentures @fal @get_hydrahost @parasail_io
Kindred Ventures retweeted
We @sequoia are thrilled to lead @MeckaAI’s Series B. AI took the digital world by storm; bringing it into the physical world will be a wave at least as large, but harder - it demands excellence across research, hardware, software, operations and deployment.
That is the mission @joshavata, @jasontheutopian and the Mecka AI team have taken on: helping physical AI labs, robotics companies and enterprises reach physical AGI, as their partner for training data, RL and deployment. They built differentiated advantages in each discipline and combined them into a strong, scalable and flexible platform that has helped them win over many of the leading AI labs and robotics companies and quickly become the emerging leader in this category.
That is why we are excited to back them, and why NVIDIA, Samsung, Microsoft and Qualcomm joined the round, alongside exceptional founders and operators including Tony Xu, Frank Slootman, Milan Kovac, Jonathan Chadwick and many more.
Kindred Ventures retweeted
Really proud of this team. We’re building the hardware, data and research to help robots learn from human experience, and there’s a huge amount left to do. With the backing of Sequoia and others, we're making aggressive bets in bringing general purpose robots to life!
To do this, we’re hiring researchers and engineers across computer vision, platform, robotics and infrastructure. If you want to build with us, or have a research idea we should talk about, send me a message.
Thank you to everyone backing us. We’re just getting started.
Kindred Ventures retweeted
To the obsessive dreamers, consider joining us at mecka.ai/hiring
Read more: mecka.ai/news/series-b
Thank you to @EdLudlow @gradypb @Alfred_Lin for telling our story
