Flapping Airplanes Raises $1 Billion Series A at $6 Billion Valuation

Series A Funding Announcement

Flapping Airplanes, an AI lab founded a year ago, announced it has raised a $1 billion Series A funding round. The round was co-led by Index and Lux, and reportedly values the company at $6 billion. This follows a $180 million seed round nine months prior, which had valued the company at $1.5 billion.

Investor Participation

Existing investors Sequoia, GV, and Kleiner Perkins participated in the new funding round. Other investors in the company include Valor, Atreides, A*, and Nvidia.

Founding Team Background

The company was founded by Aidan Smith, a former Thiel fellow who worked at Neuralink, and brothers Asher and Ben Spector. Asher Spector holds a statistics PhD from Stanford, while Ben Spector, a computer science PhD student at Stanford, founded Prod, a student-run startup accelerator.

Core Technology and Mission

Flapping Airplanes is developing a "megakernel framework" designed to perform entire training runs, serve inference, and play video games simultaneously within a single kernel. The founders state this framework can overlap memory-bound inference with compute-bound training, aiming to keep GPUs active and reduce idle time.

The company's primary goal is to create intelligent systems that require less data for training and are more cost-effective to run. They believe their approach can create AI systems "without ingesting half the internet" and make models significantly more data-efficient.

Future Outlook

With the new $1 billion in funding, Flapping Airplanes plans to expand its team and continue developing its technology to achieve its goal of more data-efficient and cost-effective AI systems.