Flapping Airplanes, a startup founded about a year ago, announced Wednesday that it raised a $1 billion Series A round co-led by Index and Lux, reportedly valuing the company at $6 billion. The round follows a $180 million seed round from GV, Sequoia, and Index at a $1.5 billion valuation nine months earlier, meaning the company's valuation has quadrupled. Sequoia and GV participated again, with Kleiner Perkins, Valor, Atreides, A*, and Nvidia also listed as investors.
The company was founded by Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector. Smith is a former Thiel fellow who worked at Neuralink in college; Asher Spector has a Stanford statistics PhD; and Ben Spector, a Stanford computer science PhD student, previously founded the student-run startup accelerator Prod. Sequoia partner David Cahn, an investor, has described the founders as building the "young person's AGI lab."
Flapping Airplanes says its core product is a "megakernel framework" that can run training, inference, and even video game play in a single GPU program. The founders claim it can combine memory-bound inference with compute-bound training, keeping chips busier and reducing the amount of data needed to build intelligent systems. Their stated goal is to lower the cost of training and running AI models. Asher Spector has said that a model a million times more data efficient would be a million times easier to put into the economy. The fresh capital will go toward hiring as the company tries to deliver on that promise.