Fal just closed a massive $140 million Series D round led by Sequoia Capital, tripling its valuation to $4.5 billion in what marks the AI infrastructure startup's third fundraise this year. The San Francisco-based company, which provides the backend infrastructure powering AI models for giants like Adobe and Shopify, is now racing ahead in the red-hot multimodal AI space with over $200 million in annual revenue.
The AI infrastructure gold rush just got another major validator. Fal, the startup that's become the invisible backbone powering image, video, and audio AI models for developers, announced it closed a $140 million Series D led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz, and other investors.
The round, which Bloomberg reports valued the company at $4.5 billion, represents a stunning triple from its July Series C valuation of roughly $1.5 billion. That's the kind of rocket-ship growth that's become the new normal in AI infrastructure, where companies that can actually handle the computational demands of modern AI models are worth their weight in silicon.
Fal's trajectory tells the story of 2025's AI infrastructure boom perfectly. The company has now raised three rounds this year alone, reflecting both the massive capital requirements of scaling AI infrastructure and investors' fierce competition to get into the space. According to sources familiar with the deal, the $140 million figure represents new capital raised, while additional money changed hands through secondary sales where existing investors cashed out portions of their stakes.
TechCrunch previously reported in October that Fal was raising around $250 million at a $4 billion-plus valuation. The discrepancy reflects the structure of the deal - $140 million in primary capital for the company's operations, with the remainder flowing to early investors through secondary transactions.
What's driving this feeding frenzy? Fal has positioned itself as the pick-and-shovel play in the AI gold rush, providing the critical infrastructure layer that lets companies deploy multimodal AI models without building their own data centers. The startup's client roster reads like a who's who of digital creativity: Adobe, Shopify, Canva, and Quora all rely on Fal's infrastructure to power their AI features.
