By Anna Tong

SAN FRANCISCO, July 31 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence infrastructure company fal raised a $125 million Series C round valuing the company at $1.5 billion, the company said Thursday.

Venture capital fund Meritech led the round with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Shopify Ventures and Google AI Futures fund. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Notable Capital, First Round Capital, Unusual Ventures and Village Global also participated in the round.

San Francisco-based fal, which specializes in running audio, video and image models on behalf of enterprises, is part of a growing class of service providers to companies looking to use AI models that are not text-based, sometimes known as multimodal models or generative media models.

In particular, image generation AI models, where users type in prompts to generate novel images, have taken off with consumers this year.

While ChatGPT's initial viral takeoff was from its ability to generate paragraphs of text, its most recent viral moment came in April when it unveiled the ability to create images based on the hand-drawn style of famed Japanese animation outfit Studio Ghibli.

Thanks to that feature, ChatGPT's average weekly active users breached the 150 million mark for the first time, according to data from market research firm Similarweb.

Most of fal's customers are using its platform for enterprise purposes, such as to create different images of a product for an ecommerce website or for online advertising.

"With generative AI, you can create infinite iterations of the same ad," fal CEO Burkay Gur told Reuters. "You can create different versions for different demographics. You can A/B test it as much as you want. And there is incremental value on each asset that you create."

(Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Stephen Coates)

((anna.tong@thomsonreuters.com; Mob: +1-650-468-3913))