AI lab Flapping Airplanes raises $1B at $6B valuation

One-year-old AI startup Flapping Airplanes has raised a $1 billion Series A round at a reported $6 billion valuation, sharply raising its value from the $1.5 billion valuation it received just nine months ago at launch. The round was co-led by Index and Lux Capital, with participation from existing investors Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins, as well as Valor, Atreides, A* and Nvidia. The company had previously raised a $180 million seed round from GV, Sequoia and Index. Flapping Airplanes was founded by Aidan Smith, a former founder and Thiel fellow who worked at Neuralink during college, and brothers Asher and Ben Spector. Asher Spector is a Stanford statistics PhD, while Ben Spector was a Stanford computer science PhD student and founded startup accelerator Prod while at MIT. The founding team has been praised by investors as a high-signal group of young technical founders, with Sequoia partner David Cahn describing them as building a young person’s AGI lab. The company is focused on finding more efficient ways to train and run large AI models. Its core technology is a megakernel framework designed to perform entire training runs, serve inference and execute other tasks in a single GPU program. The approach aims to overlap memory-bound inference with compute-bound training, reducing idle GPU time and improving overall system efficiency. The founders argue that current AI systems are not fully utilizing GPU capabilities and that more efficient architectures could enable powerful systems without the massive data and compute requirements typical of modern models. Asher Spector has suggested that dramatically improving data efficiency could make AI far easier to deploy across the economy. With the new funding, Flapping Airplanes plans to expand hiring and continue development of its framework, pursuing lower-cost, lower-data approaches to building intelligent systems.