Burkay Gur

Gur held an engineering role at OracleOracleOracle (Oracle Corporation) is a U.S. enterprise software and cloud computing company founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates. Starting with relational databases, it expanded into enterprise applications, cloud infrastructure, hardware, and industry systems, and broadened its product range through acquisitions of companies such as Sun Microsystems, NetSuite, and Cerner.Open the full entry and then led machine learning development at the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase for several years.⁠[1][2]

In 2021 Gur co-founded fal with Gorkem Yurtseven, a former software developer at AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry; the name is short for “Features and labels,” the legal entity is Features & Labels Inc., and Yurtseven serves as chief technology officer.⁠[1][2]

On September 18, 2024, fal announced a combined $23 million across two rounds: a previously undisclosed $9 million seed round led by Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry and a $14 million Series A led by Kindred Ventures that valued the company at $80 million; other investors included Black Forest Labs co-founder Robin Rombach, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, VercelVercelVercel is a cloud application development and deployment company founded by Guillermo Rauch in 2015 as ZEIT. It contributes to the open-source React framework Next.js and provides application hosting, deployment and runtime services; its products later expanded to AI SDK, v0 and infrastructure for AI applications. The company adopted its current name in 2020 and raised a $300 million Series F in 2025.Open the full entry founder Guillermo Rauch, Balaji SrinivasanBalaji SrinivasanBalaji Srinivasan is an entrepreneur, investor and the author of The Network State, the founder of Network School, and a former chief technology officer of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded Counsyl and 21, along with its successor product Earn.com, was involved in projects such as Coin Center, and has backed companies such as fomo as an angel investor.Open the full entry and Hugging Face CTO Julien Chaumond. The company had 17 employees at the time.⁠[1]

Explaining the company’s thesis, Gur said: “The big bet was that the nascent space of generative media was about to change all media consumed.” He also said that fal had reached 500,000 developers on its platform.⁠[1]

On August 1, 2025, Andreessen Horowitz released the podcast episode “Performance and Passion: Fal's Approach to AI Inference,” led by a16z general partner Jennifer Li with Gur and fal head of engineering Batuhan Taskaya. They described how fal built an inference platform for image, video and audio models, which they call a generative media cloud, how the early team prioritized speed, performance and user experience while working around limited GPU capacity during the AI infrastructure crunch, and discussed sales and hiring strategy, the team’s enthusiasm for these modalities and competition among video models. The same day, a16z uploaded the video “The Future of AI Video: How Fal.ai is Making AI Video Faster & Easier” to YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry.⁠[3][4]

In December 2025 fal raised $140 million at a $4.5 billion valuation, and in April 2026 a Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry-led Series E raised $350 million at an $8 billion valuation. On November 3, 2026, fal closed a $1.3 billion Series F at a $16 billion valuation, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from NVIDIANVIDIANVIDIA is an American semiconductor and computing technology company that provides graphics processing units, artificial intelligence infrastructure, networking interconnects, and computing software, and is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker NVDA.Open the full entry, Sound Ventures, HOF Capital and T. Rowe PriceT. Rowe PriceT. Rowe Price is a global asset management firm headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Founded by Thomas Rowe Price Jr. in 1937, it mainly provides active equity, fixed income, multi-asset, retirement, and alternative investment management. The group’s shares trade on Nasdaq under the ticker TROW, and Rob Sharps serves as chair and chief executive officer.Open the full entry; Bessemer partner Talia Goldberg joined its board. The company had raised more than $1.9 billion in total and had 185 employees at the time.⁠[2]

Explaining the size of the round, Gur said surging demand required more compute: “We hit a point in summer where we were not able to serve our customers and had to rate-limit them.” He also said pretraining a fal-owned model was not on the near-term agenda, though he did not rule it out.⁠[2]

X: Public account: https://x.com/burkaygur (opens in a new window).⁠[3]