Fal.ai, a dev-focused platform for AI-generated audio, video, and images, today revealed that it’s raised $23 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Black Forest Labs co-founder Robin Rombach, and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas.
It’s a two-round deal. $14 million of Fal’s total came from a Series A tranche led by Kindred Ventures. The remaining $9 million is from a previously-unannounced, a16z-led seed round.
Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven co-launched Fal (short for “Features and labels”) in 2021. Gur previously worked at Amazon as a software dev, while Yurtseven, an ex-Oracle engineer, led machine learning development at Coinbase for several years.
While hacking together side projects during the pandemic, Gur and Yurtseven, longtime friends, realized the growing demand for AI cloud infrastructure — particularly infrastructure to run generative AI models.
“The big bet was that the nascent space of generative media was about to change all media consumed,” Gur told TechCrunch. “The timing worked out perfectly, because there were some breakthrough models that were released right after Fal started.”
Fal offers two products: privately managed compute and workflows for running models, and APIs for open source models that generate images, audio, and video. Fal was one of the first platforms to host Black Forest Labs’ Flux, the model powering image generation in Grok, X’s controversial chatbot.
Many cloud rivals like CoreWeave provide resources along these same lines. But what makes Fal different is its scalability, Gur argues.
“Our platform can handle hundreds of millions of requests [and our] own inference engine is the most performant,” he said. “Using Fal, you can integrate models into your applications — the product is for enterprises that have media at the core of what they do.”
Whether those claims hold up to scrutiny or not, Fal has managed to grow an impressive customer roster. In addition to Perplexity (which explains Srinivas’ investment) and enterprise customers in the retail and e-commerce sector, popular generative AI apps Photoroom, Freepik, and PlayHT are all paying for Fal’s services, Gur says.
It’s a profitable bunch. A source tells TechCrunch that Fal’s annual run rate has climbed to nearly $10 million (~$800,000 per month), up around 10x from January. The Series A valued the startup at $80 million.
“Fal has reached 500,000 developers on the platform,” Gur said, “generating 50 million images, videos, or audio streams a day.”
Given the many deepfake and misinformation risks around generative technologies, I asked Gur if Fal has moderation policies or filters in place for sensitive content. He said that Fal prefers to take a hands-off approach, leaving the decision whether to implement safety features up to the companies developing models on Fal’s platform.
“For moderation, a lot of what is done happens during training, so we leave that to the companies building the models,” Gur said. “As you might guess, having a very robust program requires more research and resources.”
It’s a bit of an empty answer, given that Fal sponsors some open source training efforts under its research grants program. One would assume that Fal has a say in the development of models it funds.
Gur did suggest, however, that Fal is looking to undertake some de-toxifying efforts itself… at some point. “We do have plans to do more of this in-house, and rely on some vendors specialized in this type of work,” he said.
I asked about IP liability, as well. Should the models on Fal’s platform regurgitate any copyrighted data, will the company protect customers if they’re sued? Gur wouldn’t answer. But the language in Fal’s terms of service imply that customers are on their own.
That’s in contrast to generative AI products from Adobe, Canva, Google, Microsoft, and Shutterstock, all of which have indemnity clauses (albeit with some carve-outs). Vendors like Getty Images, as well as startups such as Fairly Trained, have gone so far as to train models only on “commercially safe” content to avoid the threat of copyright lawsuits altogether.
That’s all to say, those who use Fal assume some risk.
Fal intends to spend the bulk of the capital it’s raised so far on upgrading its inference optimization product to make it self-serve. The company is also establishing a research team that’ll focus on model optimizations and will join Fal’s 17-person staff.
Fal’s other backers include Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan, and Hugging Face CTO Julien Chaumond.
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Parents understand the challenge of keeping young kids engaged in online learning. Nurture is a new app designed for children aged 4 to 7 that features interactive content and games to capture their interest. The company’s mission is to equip children with critical life skills such as socializing, basic financial understanding, mindfulness, fitness, nutrition, and more through story-based adventures that kids can actively participate in.
Nurture announced Wednesday its $2.8 million pre-seed round, led by Golden Gate Ventures. The funding will go toward bringing on preschool content creators to help develop content for the platform.
The flagship title that Nurture first launched is called “Doki’s Delivery” and is focused on helping kids learn social-emotional skills. The series follows a group of characters who are on a mission to deliver an egg in a spaceship.
The app also has a dual-screen component that requires parents to download the Nurture TV app on Fire TV or Google TV so kids can interact between both screens. For “Doki’s Delivery,” kids can use their phone or tablet as a game controller while playing on the TV screen. They can tilt the mobile device from side to side to help the characters avoid obstacles.
Other interactions include answering a call from the main character, designing the spaceship, and hatching the mysterious egg, which players can then take care of– similar to Tamagotchi, the popular kids’ toy.
“I didn’t want to make it passive, mindless screen time. I want to make it an active, interactive learning experience,” co-founder and CEO Roger Egan told TechCrunch. “[Once kids] get the concepts, then we use the games and interactives to practice the skills and apply them.”
The company plans to release new original content focusing on “growth mindset and financial thinking,” as explained by Egan. Additionally, Nurture is in discussions with around 20 popular third-party creators to enhance its content library. Nurture’s creator platform enables creators to host content on their own digital “islands,” which users can access by swiping through the app menu.
In addition to the immersive learning content, parents will have the ability to track their kids’ performance in the games.
“We have these things called reflection moments where we ask questions, and the child can answer… With that answer, we can synthesize that information and understand how well do they understand the concept, and then feed that back into the product and report to parents about how they’re learning and showing progress,” Egan said.
There will also be offline activities to provide parents with ideas on how they can reinforce the concepts learned in the app and encourage children to apply their knowledge in everyday situations.
Nurture was founded in 2022, a few years after Egan’s kids started remote learning during the pandemic. Having a front-row seat to his children’s education, he believed that traditional schooling doesn’t adequately prepare kids for the rapidly changing world, especially one powered by AI. In his opinion, children should also learn things like adaptability, critical thinking, digital literacy, mindfulness, and empathy to thrive in the future. However, he struggled to find suitable alternatives to complement his kids’ education.
Egan previously founded the online grocer RedMart, which was acquired by Alibaba. He is joined by co-founders Danny Limanseta (chief product officer), who served as product design lead at Redmart; Sally Doherty (chief people officer), who previously worked at Microsoft; and Scott and Julie Stewart (chief creative officers), a husband and wife team who specialize in children’s animated content, such as “Lego Friends: The Next Chapter.”
In addition to Priebe being an investor, he’s also a game design advisor for Nurture. Priebe was responsible for creating Club Penguin, an incredibly popular multiplayer online game.
“The next generation of kids are picking up games faster than watching a show,” Priebe told us. “I really like the idea of you’re not just going to sit there and watch linear TV anymore…It’s really novel, how the [Nurture] characters stop and bring the kid into the adventure, and they’re like, ‘Now, what would you do?’ or ‘How would you want us to do this?’”
Currently, Nurture is an invite-only beta available for users in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. It plans to expand to other markets in 2025. The company will also launch a paid subscription once the app is open to the public.
Other participants in the round include Reach Capital and Seedcamp, with participation from Club Penguin co-founder Lance Priebe. Other notable advisors include Manual Bronstein, Roblox’s chief product officer; Scott Kraft, former lead writer and executive producer of “Paw Patrol”; and Joey Mazzarino, the puppeteer on “Sesame Street” known for his roles as Murray Monster, Stinky the Stinkweed, and other Muppets.
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch
Parents understand the challenge of keeping young kids engaged in online learning. Nurture is a new app designed for children aged 4 to 7 that features interactive content and games to capture their interest. The company’s mission is to equip children with critical life skills such as socializing, basic financial understanding, mindfulness, fitness, nutrition, and more through story-based adventures that kids can actively participate in.
Nurture announced Wednesday its $2.8 million pre-seed round, led by Golden Gate Ventures. The funding will go toward bringing on preschool content creators to help develop content for the platform.
The flagship title that Nurture first launched is called “Doki’s Delivery” and is focused on helping kids learn social-emotional skills. The series follows a group of characters who are on a mission to deliver an egg in a spaceship.
The app also has a dual-screen component that requires parents to download the Nurture TV app on Fire TV or Google TV so kids can interact between both screens. For “Doki’s Delivery,” kids can use their phone or tablet as a game controller while playing on the TV screen. They can tilt the mobile device from side to side to help the characters avoid obstacles.
Other interactions include answering a call from the main character, designing the spaceship, and hatching the mysterious egg, which players can then take care of– similar to Tamagotchi, the popular kids’ toy.
“I didn’t want to make it passive, mindless screen time. I want to make it an active, interactive learning experience,” co-founder and CEO Roger Egan told TechCrunch. “[Once kids] get the concepts, then we use the games and interactives to practice the skills and apply them.”
The company plans to release new original content focusing on “growth mindset and financial thinking,” as explained by Egan. Additionally, Nurture is in discussions with around 20 popular third-party creators to enhance its content library. Nurture’s creator platform enables creators to host content on their own digital “islands,” which users can access by swiping through the app menu.
In addition to the immersive learning content, parents will have the ability to track their kids’ performance in the games.
“We have these things called reflection moments where we ask questions, and the child can answer… With that answer, we can synthesize that information and understand how well do they understand the concept, and then feed that back into the product and report to parents about how they’re learning and showing progress,” Egan said.
There will also be offline activities to provide parents with ideas on how they can reinforce the concepts learned in the app and encourage children to apply their knowledge in everyday situations.
Nurture was founded in 2022, a few years after Egan’s kids started remote learning during the pandemic. Having a front-row seat to his children’s education, he believed that traditional schooling doesn’t adequately prepare kids for the rapidly changing world, especially one powered by AI. In his opinion, children should also learn things like adaptability, critical thinking, digital literacy, mindfulness, and empathy to thrive in the future. However, he struggled to find suitable alternatives to complement his kids’ education.
Egan previously founded the online grocer RedMart, which was acquired by Alibaba. He is joined by co-founders Danny Limanseta (chief product officer), who served as product design lead at Redmart; Sally Doherty (chief people officer), who previously worked at Microsoft; and Scott and Julie Stewart (chief creative officers), a husband and wife team who specialize in children’s animated content, such as “Lego Friends: The Next Chapter.”
In addition to Priebe being an investor, he’s also a game design advisor for Nurture. Priebe was responsible for creating Club Penguin, an incredibly popular multiplayer online game.
“The next generation of kids are picking up games faster than watching a show,” Priebe told us. “I really like the idea of you’re not just going to sit there and watch linear TV anymore…It’s really novel, how the [Nurture] characters stop and bring the kid into the adventure, and they’re like, ‘Now, what would you do?’ or ‘How would you want us to do this?’”
Currently, Nurture is an invite-only beta available for users in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. It plans to expand to other markets in 2025. The company will also launch a paid subscription once the app is open to the public.
Other participants in the round include Reach Capital and Seedcamp, with participation from Club Penguin co-founder Lance Priebe. Other notable advisors include Manual Bronstein, Roblox’s chief product officer; Scott Kraft, former lead writer and executive producer of “Paw Patrol”; and Joey Mazzarino, the puppeteer on “Sesame Street” known for his roles as Murray Monster, Stinky the Stinkweed, and other Muppets.
Keep reading the article on Tech Crunch