Kindred Ventures

Thrilled to triple down in the latest $125M Series C round at fal, the provider of the first, largest, and only Generative Media Cloud, and continue to support their incredible founders Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven! Communication, creativity, and storytelling are at the heart of every industry in every market on the planet. fal is the foundational platform for the generative media space, enabling lightning-fast inference for diverse AI video, image, and audio models from hundreds of frontier model labs from around the world to reach millions of developers at large enterprises to the tiniest of startups. Read more below at Steve Jang's blog post as we share their story and some of the recent eye-popping data about their growth in just 18 months. Congrats and continued speed to the entire team at fal! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 https://xmrrwallet.com/cmx.plnkd.in/gEqWbUzy

Super excited to share that fal has raised $125M Series C at a $1.5B valuation! Over the past year and half since launch, Fal has quickly become the foundational platform for developers in the Generative Media space. At Kindred Ventures, we've tripled down in this latest financing round led by Meritech Capital and are fired up to continue supporting Burkay Gur Gorkem Yurtseven Batuhan T. and team. In just over 18 months since launch, fal has built a Generative Media Cloud, which is a hosted platform composed of (1) a lightning-fast inference engine for the many different generative video, image, audio and voice, and (2) the most comprehensive marketplace of models with workflows and tooling. Their platform allows frontier model labs - including Google DeepMind, Black Forest Labs, Stability AI, ByteDance, Kling AI, MiniMax, and PlayAI - to avoid building out costly infrastructure to offer inference to developers, and just focus on training the highest quality image, video, and voice models. On the other side of their platform, fal empowers developers and creatives to access hundreds of these customized video, image, and audio models and build applications or generate content immediately, versus paying for expensive and slow inference from hyperscalers, or maintaining costly GPU clouds. Today, no other company comes close to the depth, breadth, and speed performance of Fal's Generative Media Cloud platform. In just over the past year and half, they have achieved some incredible milestones as a small team: ✅ 1,000,000+ developers ✅ 100+ large enterprise customers like Adobe, Canva, Shopify, and Perplexity ✅ 300+ open and closed source image/audio/voice/video models ✅ 99.99% uptime ✅ Only 36 people on the Fal team ✅ $0 to $95 million in ARR in 18 months, making it one of the fastest growing startups ever in terms of revenue. 🚀🚀🚀 Fal just raised $125M in Series C with the company valued at $1.5B, led by Meritech Capital (Arsham Memarzadeh) alongside Shopify and Salesforce, and joined by previous investors Kindred Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz (Jennifer Li), Notable Capital (Glenn Solomon, Dan Cahana), Bessemer Venture Partners (Talia Goldberg), First Round Capital (Todd Jackson) and others. This infusion of capital will fuel further research and engineering talent to drive growth, global expansion, and continued close attention and support for developers everywhere. Huge congratulations to Burkay Gur, Gorkem Yurtseven, Batuhan T., and the entire fal team on the fresh growth capital, phenomenal progress in this important space, and building such a small but most stellar team. Proud to continue the journey with y'all! 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽

Excited to share that Adriana A. Martinez has joined Kindred Ventures as our new Chief Financial Officer! 🎉 Adriana brings an exceptional track record in financial leadership from ICONIQ with nearly two decades of experience in venture and private equity auditing, accounting, and finance for leading investment and advisory firms in the Bay Area (KPMG, Rothstein Kass, and Deloitte). Adriana’s leadership comes at a pivotal moment as we experience inflection points in both our fund platform and our theme focus on AI and frontier technologies. Her domain experience and entrepreneurial nature will be instrumental as we double down on our mission to back ambitious early-stage founders building generational companies. Welcome to the team! 🚀 Read more: https://xmrrwallet.com/cmx.plnkd.in/gkdwCSws

"Even though AI may feel like it's entering a phase of steadier progress and scale, we're truly only scratching the surface when it comes to generative media—both at the infrastructure and application layers." Couldn’t agree more here. Today, there are ~30 million advertisers globally—but that number is poised to explode past 100 million in the coming years because AI is radically lowering the barrier to creating high-quality ads. Thanks you to Kanyi Maqubela, Coco Mao and Feb Tea for a great conversation, and Steve Jang for the invite.

The Information's Akash Pasricha spoke with Kindred Ventures's own Steve Jang about the new robotaxi landscape with Waymo and Tesla, prior portfolio company, Uber and its new partners Lucid Motors, and Nuro. Another topic they discussed: The new agentic AI browser, Comet, from our portfolio company, Perplexity. Steve explained why Perplexity’s Comet browser stands out compared to the Chrome browser by Google, which merely browses website, while Comet allows you to deeply explore the content and applications of any website and also take actions in powerful multi-step fashion. Compared to OpenAI's Agent service, Comet meets users where they are—letting them browse the Web as usual, but enabling them to use context, memory, and prompts to take meaningful actions and execute tasks on their behalf. Akash Pasricha: "Why do you think Perplexity Comet browser will beat Google Chrome and OpenAI's Agent?" Steve Jang: “What Perplexity is doing is saying…it's not just about knowledge and answers. Maybe it is about being able to help people get instant answers from search and do deep research, but also to take multi-step actions, through the browser.” “But the most important thing about the browser is that it's giving you immediate context, memory, and a user interface that is quite different [from a pure chat client]. And this is really important.” Akash Pasricha: "Regarding the Uber/Lucid/Nuro rollout, this seems like a long time to launch if it's over 6 years?" Steve Jang: "The rollout takes time. You have to get it just right. There's really no margin for error... Safety, local government, public opinion, all of these things are super sensitive when it comes to AVs. It's a slower expansion, as opposed to in pure software technology." "The objective of this for Nuro is to provide state-of-the-art but agnostic product, and have such lock-in that the switching costs [for an automaker or a ridesharing network using Nuro's autonomy technology] are incredibly high." Watch the full video below! 👇 https://xmrrwallet.com/cmx.plnkd.in/g24eDWrJ

"Inference for generative media is a massive opportunity - even bigger than text-based LLMs perhaps. It’s transforming how the world creates, innovates, and tells stories." — Gorkem Yurtseven, Co-Founder & CTO at fal This past week, we at Kindred Ventures alongside fal hosted 80 founders, engineers, and creatives at Generative Media: Creativity at Machine Speed event. Gorkem Yurtseven and Steve Jang discussed fal’s early pivot to image and diffusion models, optimizing GPU utilization for 300+ models across video, audio, and image. Kanyi Maqubela led a panel with Yinan (Steven) Na (Creatify AI), Coco Mao (OpenArt AI), and Feb Tea (Azuki), delving into AI-driven storytelling, anime, and advertising, showcasing optimized models and inference for lower compute costs and creative barriers. If there was one big takeaway, it’s this: even though the AI space seems to be hitting a steadier progress and scaling rate, we are truly just getting started in generative media on both an infrastructure and application level. From creative studios to global consumer brands to social media platforms, this is the beginning of a massive creative shift in their internal workflows, but also in the new user behaviors and immense variety of products offered in today's consumer internet. The Kindred Ventures team is proud to partner with our portfolio company and friends at fal to push these creative conversations forward. Thanks to our speakers and community from the generative media community! Stay tuned for more founder talks and events from Kindred Ventures. 🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼 https://xmrrwallet.com/cmx.plnkd.in/ga37mUnv

Warmest congratulations to the awesome PlayAI founders and team on your acquisition by Meta Superintelligence Labs! We’ve enjoyed working with you for just 12 months now, but it’s been a great adventure supporting you, experiencing the always-fun demos, and watching you guys ship incredible models and applications. 🚀🚀🚀

This Thursday, July 17th, in San Francisco, Kindred Ventures and fal are gathering a focused group of founders, builders, investors, brands, and creatives to discuss their insights and some of the recent step changes in Generative Media. This category is quickly moving from experimentation and primitive models to a new reality of companies and developers shipping to production across various industries, and much higher quality models coming from labs around the world. In fact, much of what you are seeing in social media, ads, and even on streaming platforms today is designed or made with generative media tools. Generative Media has the potential to be as globally impactful as LLMs on how AI transforms all industries, personal consumer experiences, and communication broadly, especially in light of the reality that true multimodal LLMs, agents, and applications require not only understanding of various visual and audio inputs, but also ever-improving generative outputs of audio, voice, images, and video. We're excited to bring together founders from fal, Creatify AI, OpenArt AI, and others to share insights and stir up a great conversation about what's happening in the state-of-the-art and on the frontier edge of adoption in the creative world. Generative Shift will feature a conversation with Gorkem Yurtseven, Co-founder & CTO of fal, and Steve Jang from Kindred Ventures as well as a panel discussion with some of the leading founders building in the generative media space today, including Yinan (Steven) Na from Creatify AI, Coco Mao from OpenArt AI, and others. Register for the event here: https://xmrrwallet.com/cmx.plu.ma/q75zqg4c

for our portfolio companies at Kindred Ventures which are building AI agents, apps, and model labs, Northflank has been an awesome go-to devops partner for managing pre/post-training and developer inference, while helping run cpu & gpu workloads across multiple clouds. one more thing: they also have great spot GPU access ✨ another case study with Superagent (YC W24) 👇🏽

Long MENA! It was a pleasure to get to spend a week in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh meeting founders, fellow VCs, and LPs. The region is full of optimism, smarts, and ambition about the opportunity to remake their economies (and the world’s) thanks to AI. This session covered the future of data labelling, AI ERP systems, events marketplaces, cancer data platforms, vision language models, and beyond. Dubai Internstional Financial Centre DIFC is one of the most interesting special economic zones in the world. Totally understand why so much money is moving _to_ the region. Thanks Silicon Valley Venture & Innovation and DIFC for your hospitality. Zafer Younis Leen Khzai Jumana El Saadi