Key facts
- Flapping Airplanes raised $1 billion in a Series A round.
- The company's valuation reportedly reached $6 billion.
- The startup's previous seed round nine months ago valued it at $1.5 billion.
- Investors in the new round include Index, Lux, Sequoia, GV, Kleiner Perkins, Valor, Atreides, A*, and Nvidia.
- Flapping Airplanes aims to train large AI models with less data using a megakernel framework.
Flapping Airplanes, an AI startup founded less than a year ago, announced on Wednesday that it has secured $1 billion in Series A funding. The round was reportedly led by Index and Lux, valuing the company at $6 billion. This marks a significant increase from its $1.5 billion valuation during its $180 million seed round nine months prior. The company, founded by Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector, aims to develop AI systems that require less data for training and operation. Their proprietary megakernel framework is designed to optimize GPU usage by overlapping memory-bound inference with compute-bound training, potentially reducing training and running costs for AI models.