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The Unconventional Moves that Defined fal
fal is the kind of company that makes “hockey stick growth” feel quaint.
“We suspected 2025 was going to be big, but we had no idea it would be this big,” the founders said.
Last year alone, they raised a $49M Series B (which Notable led), a $125M Series C (with the company sharing they had 60x’d revenue in 12 months), and a $140M Series D, capping the year off with a $4.5B valuation.
There aren’t many historical parallels to that kind of growth. Even in the AI era, the generative media platform is operating in rare air.
So it would probably surprise you that if you paged the calendar back to 2022, founders Burkay Gur and Gorkem Yurtseven weren’t even working in generative media at all.
But when Stable Diffusion launched, they decided to walk away from their tabular data infrastructure product (and its paying customers) to start over.
"We saw the signal and chased it," Burkay said recently during a closed-door session with Notable Capital portfolio founders.
We get into some of the unconventional moves that have defined one of the fastest-growing startups we’ve ever seen.
Unconventional Move #1: Being first, every time
Being the first to market with your product is no longer enough, with AI rapidly accelerating the pace of product and feature release. Picking the most important area to consistently show up first matters.
Burkay and Gorkem made a big bet: they wanted fal to be the first place any new model goes production-ready, before anyone else. "We identified that this creates another touch point for us to do marketing, talk to our customers, and grab some attention on Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News," Gorkem explained.
This can sometimes mean multiple model releases in a week, a pace that most teams would consider logistically impossible. Each one became a marketing moment: tweets, community engagement, developer goodwill. What started as instinct got formalized into process over time.
After years of consistently showing up with same-day model releases, model vendors started coming to fal directly, offering advanced notice before public releases. “We earned it. Now we have more heads up from model vendors. People understand why we’re valuable,” Burkay said.
Unconventional Move #2: Staying agnostic.
Early on, fal made a deliberate choice not to build at the application layer. That meant no tool for architects, no custom platform for fashion designers (and so on).
It was a bet on volume over vertical. "It's better to build something that can mass-generate hundreds of clothes, and then let people pick things," Burkay said.
The same logic applies to their model strategy. In an industry where the leading model can change overnight, fal powers over 1300 open source and closed source models — because in a market this fragmented, the ecosystem that works with everything will outlast the ones that pick a winner. Instead, builders can chain models together into solutions that no single model could power alone.
What that combination also bought them was flexibility. When image editing exploded at the same time as video, they were positioned to ride both waves.
Unconventional Move #3: Hiring only when it really hurts
For the first year and a half, the core fal team was just six people. When they finally started hiring, they were incredibly cautious — identifying a very specific bottleneck and filling exactly that (and nothing more). And while Burkay and Gorkem would admit that it’s caused some expected friction, they’ve remained committed to the ultra-selective approach.
The first bottleneck: model breadth. The image and video model market is fragmented in ways the LLM market isn't — there's no one model that does everything, and customers need access to dozens of specialized models. fal scaled their applied ML team specifically to close that gap.
The second bottleneck (once the model library was deep enough): relationship management. They had enterprise customers scaling fast, but not enough people to stay close to them. That's when they finally started building the GTM team. "Our first sales leader looked into the data and quickly figured out there was a lot more demand that we needed to fulfill," Burkay said. "We were lagging behind."
The bottleneck they’re still sitting with: Even today, fal has zero product managers on staff. As fal has grown to serve both developers and enterprise customers, product thinking has stayed embedded in the engineering team itself, not handed off to a traditional PM layer. But as fal scales, Burkay and Gorkem know they will need someone built for this moment, not a conventional PM, but whatever that role looks like at the frontier of generative AI.
For all the growth, Burkay and Gorkem will be the first to tell you the gen media market is still earlier than it looks. Video models are still improving dramatically, image editing is still expanding, and agentic use cases are just starting to emerge. But fal's founders will keep betting on the same combination that got them here: good instincts, good architecture, and a willingness to move faster than anyone else before the market catches up.
Garrett Lord went all in on Handshake AI — now it’s at nearly $1B
Speaking of insane growth, Handshake founder Garrett Lord also knows what it means to redefine hockey sticks. In December 2024, he went to the board and told them he wanted to go all-in on Handshake AI, a platform connecting experts with leading AI labs to train and evaluate LLMs.
Cut to today, and Handshake AI is on track to do well over $1B in revenue this year.
On the Notable Perspectives podcast, Garrett sits down with Notable’s Jeff Richards to unpack how to operate a startup inside a 12-year-old company.
Anthropic’s CFO, Krishna Rao, in his podcast debut on Invest Like the Best.
Is IC work the new career flex? Lovable’s Head of Growth says yes.