Investing in fal: the generative media company
Bessemer Venture Partners leads fal.ai’s Series F to fuel the inference layer and generative media stack.
Talia Goldberg, Sameer Dholakia, Brian Feinstein, Alex Yuditski & Bhavik Nagda
Published on Nov 3, 2026
People spend most of their screen time on images and video, and video dominates that traffic. Until recently, creating that content meant pointing a camera at something or paying someone to render it. Now, it means calling on an API, and most of the generative media world is calling on fal’s.
Generative media is becoming one of AI’s largest markets. The last big shift in how images and video were made, from hand-drawn cels to CGI, took decades. This one is happening in just a few years. As model capabilities improve, production costs collapse, volume explodes, and creators experience the same step change AI coding gave developers. Real-time ad creatives, interactive video, product imagery, game assets, music and voice, avatars, video editing: each of these is now a fast-growing AI market, and most barely existed when we first invested in fal’s Series B two years ago.
We’ve backed fal in every round since, and today we’re excited to lead its Series F.
Media is a different infrastructure problem than text. LLMs produce one token at a time. Image and video models refine a whole frame over many passes, so they need memory, compute, and latency handled differently. The same serving stacks built for LLMs don’t carry over. fal has spent years on this exact problem, all the way down to the kernel. The result is infrastructure built for real-time generation at scale with low latency, low cost, and high throughput.
fal is also a two-sided ecosystem: developers get access to thousands of models through a single API, and labs leverage fal for distribution and serverless infrastructure. Many of the world’s largest companies, like Adobe, Canva, Shopify, World Labs, Amazon, and more, have moved production volume to fal.
The most impressive thing about fal is how fast the company moves to meet the demands of this moment. In just two years, fal has evolved from an inference engine to the full stack: the workflow tools creators build with, the API that reaches hundreds of models, the custom infrastructure enterprises run their own weights on, and now post-trained model development alongside the labs.
Just this August, fal moved from serving models to improving them. fal Research released H3 Max, a post-trained version of MiniMax H3 with the serving path designed together with the model. It immediately topped all major arenas and leaderboards. And that was just the beginning. Last week, fal Research partnered with Black Forest Labs on Flux 3 Max, and enterprises can commission post-trained versions of models exclusively on fal.
None of this happens without the team. Talia has known Burkay and Gorkem for over a decade, and not much has changed about their mission. They’re obsessed with expanding human creativity, ruthless about performance, close to developers, and always moving fast.
Every category produces a company that defines it. In generative media, that company is fal. We’re thrilled to continue this journey with the team. If you’re building on generative media, see the latest from fal or join their team.
Contributors
Talia Goldberg
Partner
Talia Goldberg is a partner in Bessemer’s San Francisco office. She supports teams that leverage AI to create new categories and progress the way we live and work. She looks for founders building radically better products with unique distribution models, or those pushing the frontier.
Talia joined Bessemer in 2013. She is partner to Cognition, Discord, DeepL, fal AI, Fin (fka Intercom), Kindred, Mind Robotics, Papaya Global, Perplexity, Ramp, Recall, ServiceTitan, Shippo, Stubhub, Supermaven (now Cursor / XAI), and Toss, among others. Learn more on her blog and hear from many of the entrepreneurs she has backed by listening to This is Series A. She was featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 for Venture Capital.
Talia graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She grew up in Portland, Oregon, which she insists is home to the best ice cream and pizza in America.
Sameer Dholakia
Partner
Sameer Dholakia is a partner of the growth investment practice at Bessemer, where he focuses on GenAI and Physical AI investments.
Before starting his second career in Venture Capital in 2022, Sameer spent 25 years as an operator, building software companies. His most recent role was as the CEO of Bessemer-backed, SendGrid, which he joined in 2014. He accelerated the company’s growth and led SendGrid through a successful IPO in 2017 and subsequent acquisition by leading cloud communications platform Twilio for approximately $3 billion in early 2019.
Before joining SendGrid, Sameer served as GM of the Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix, which he joined following its acquisition of his first startup, VMLogix.
Sameer earned a B.A. in economics and a M.A. in organizational studies from Stanford University. He also holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Outside of work, Sameer most treasures his time with his wife, Laura, and their two kids. He enjoys traveling, watching sports, and trying to improve his golf game. He also supports philanthropic efforts at Pledge 1% and is the Board Chair of the Menlo School Board.
Brian Feinstein
Partner
Brian is a partner of the growth investment practice at Bessemer and based in the San Francisco office.
Brian has been at Bessemer since 2008. Brian led early-stage investments in Procore (IPO), Wildlife, Restaurant365, Ada, Weave (IPO), Mambu, Fulcrum, and Clio, as well as growth investments in Ramp, Fireworks, Cognition, nCino (IPO) and Bumble (IPO). Brian also led growth buyout investments in Litify, LiveAuctioneers (acq), Beyond, Current, and CRI.
During his time at Bessemer, Brian helped found BVP Forge, Bessemer's private equity fund, and Columbia Lake Partners, a European venture debt fund.
Brian graduated from Harvard University and sits on the board of the Heckscher Foundation for Children.
Alex Yuditski
Vice President
Alex is a vice president with Bessemer’s growth investment practice where she primarily focuses on AI and cloud software investments.
Prior to joining Bessemer, Alex was an investor at Blue Owl Capital and focused on growth investments in 6sense, Brex, JumpCloud, Nuvemshop, Nylas, Kajabi, Klaviyo, Replicated, Robinhood, and Split. Prior to joining Blue Owl Capital, Alex was an investment banker in William Blair’s software M&A group and Regions Securities’ leveraged finance group.
Alex holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Wake Forest University. Outside of work, you can find Alex cheering on the New York Giants, cooking, and spending time with friends and family.
Bhavik Nagda
Investor
Bhavik is an investor in the New York office, where he focuses on enterprise software and data systems.
Prior to joining Bessemer, Bhavik was an engineer at Cruise Automation and Covariant.ai, building machine learning pipelines and user interfaces for warehouse robotics.
Bhavik earned his B.S. and masters in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He sits on MIT's Computer Science Diversity & Equity Committee and MIT's Center for Entrepreneurship Board. In his spare time, Bhavik enjoys running, hiking, and reconnecting with old friends.
