Flapping Airplanes, a startup founded about a year ago, said Wednesday it has raised a $1 billion Series A round co-led by Index and Lux at a reported $6 billion valuation. The company is working on ways to train large AI models with less data. The financing arrives nine months after Flapping Airplanes launched with a $180 million seed round from GV, Sequoia and Index.
That seed round valued the company at $1.5 billion, meaning its valuation has quadrupled with the new round. Earlier backers Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins participated in the Series A, along with Valor, Atreides, A* and Nvidia. The company did not disclose terms beyond the round size and the reported valuation.
Flapping Airplanes was founded by Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector. Smith is a former founder and Thiel fellow who worked at the brain implant company Neuralink during college. Asher Spector was a statistics PhD at Stanford, and Ben Spector was a computer science PhD student at Stanford and founded Prod while at MIT. Sequoia partner David Cahn, an investor in Flapping Airplanes, described the founders in a post earlier this year as building the young person's AGI lab; he also wrote that Prod, a five-year-old student-run startup accelerator, has become one of Silicon Valley's most powerful talent incubators.
The founders describe their work as the world's most complete megakernel framework, a kernel being a program that runs on a GPU and a megakernel bundling many tasks into one program. They say it can perform entire training runs, serve inference, play video games, and do all three simultaneously in a single kernel. The framework can also overlap memory-bound inference with compute-bound training, pairing a task that spends most of its time waiting for data with one that spends most of its time doing math so the chip rarely sits idle.
The founders argue that AI has barely scratched the surface of what GPUs can do, and they believe the approach can create intelligent systems without ingesting half the internet. Asher Spector told TechCrunch shortly after the company launched that a model a million times more data efficient is probably a million times easier to put into the economy. The goal is systems that cost less to train and run.
Flapping Airplanes now has $1 billion in new funding to hire and attempt to turn that goal into reality. The round adds to a wave of large raises by young AI startups, though the company has not said how it will spend the proceeds beyond hiring.
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