AI startup Flapping Airplanes raises $1 billion at a $6 billion valuation — TechCrunch

AI startup Flapping Airplanes announced that it had raised $1 billion in a Series A round co-led by Index and Lux. As TechCrunch reports, the company allegedly received a $6 billion valuation.

Valuation quadrupled

The new round took place nine months after the startup launched. At that time, Flapping Airplanes raised $180 million in seed funding from GV, Sequoia and Index, and was valued at $1.5 billion. At the reported $6 billion valuation, it has quadrupled.

Previous investors Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins also participated in the new round. The company’s investors are also said to include Valor, Atreides, A and Nvidia.

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Development for more efficient model training

Flapping Airplanes was founded by Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector. Smith was previously a founder, a Thiel Fellowship participant, and worked at Neuralink while in college. Asher Spector was pursuing a PhD in statistics at Stanford, while Ben Spector was a graduate student in computer science at the same university.

The startup is developing a “megakernel” framework for graphics processing units. According to the founders, it can perform full model-training cycles, provide inference, and run video games simultaneously within a single application. The company also claims that this approach makes it possible to combine tasks limited by memory access with computationally intensive training so that the graphics processor is idle less often.

Flapping Airplanes aims to create artificial intelligence systems that require less data for training and are cheaper to train and use. Asher Spector previously told TechCrunch that a model that uses data one million times more efficiently would be approximately one million times easier to deploy in the economy.