AI startup Flapping Airplanes raises $1 billion in Series A funding

Flapping Airplanes, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup, announced on Wednesday that it has closed a $1 billion Series A funding round. The venture capital firms Index and Lux co-led the round, which reportedly values the company at $6 billion. The company is less than a year old and is trying to find ways to train large AI models on less data, which could make such systems cheaper to build and run.

Valuation up fourfold

The new round came just nine months after the company launched with a $180 million seed round from GV, Sequoia and Index. That round valued the company at $1.5 billion, so the valuation has quadrupled. Earlier backers Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins also took part in the new round. Valor, Atreides, A* and Nvidia are also listed among the company's investors.

The founders

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 while in college. Asher Spector was a statistics PhD student at Stanford University, and Ben Spector was a computer science PhD student there. Ben also founded Prod, a student-run startup accelerator that Sequoia partner David Cahn has described as one of the most powerful talent incubators in Silicon Valley.

The technical idea

The founders describe their work as the most complete "megakernel" framework. A kernel is a program that runs on a graphics processor (GPU), and a megakernel bundles many tasks into a single program. The founders say the framework can run training, serve inference and play video games, and can overlap memory-bound inference with compute-bound training so that the chip is rarely idle.

Their premise is that AI has barely scratched the surface of what GPUs can do, and that intelligent systems can be built without ingesting half the internet. Asher Spector told TechCrunch that a model a million times more data efficient would probably be a million times easier to put into the economy. The new funding is intended for hiring and for pursuing that goal.