Year-old AI lab Flapping Airplanes raises $1B at a $6B valuation

Artificial intelligence startup Flapping Airplanes has secured a $1 billion Series A funding round led by Index and Lux. The financing values the one-year-old company at a reported $6 billion.

The new capital arrives just nine months after a $180 million seed round that valued the startup at $1.5 billion, quadrupling its valuation. Earlier backers including Sequoia, GV, and Kleiner Perkins participated again, alongside new investors such as Nvidia, Valor, Atreides, and A*. The enterprise was founded by Aidan Smith, Asher Spector, and Ben Spector with the mission of training large models using significantly less data.

The founders are developing what they describe as a complete megakernel framework. A kernel is a program that runs on a graphics processing unit, and a megakernel bundles multiple tasks into a single program. The team states their framework can perform training runs, serve inference, and play video games simultaneously while overlapping memory-bound tasks with compute-bound work to keep chips active.

Flapping Airplanes aims to build data-efficient intelligent systems that cost less to train and operate. The startup plans to use its new funding to hire staff and advance its technology.