Flapping Airplanes Raises $1 Billion at $6 Billion Valuation

A year-old startup, Flapping Airplanes, has made a significant splash in Silicon Valley with its impressive founding team and ambitious mission to develop more efficient artificial intelligence models. The company’s founders, Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector, have already gained recognition for their work in the field of AI research. Their goal is to create systems that can train large models using significantly less data than current methods require.

The startup has just secured a $1 billion Series A funding round, co-led by Index and Lux, which values the company at an impressive $6 billion. This latest investment comes just nine months after Flapping Airplanes launched with a seed round of $180 million from GV, Sequoia, and Index. The valuation has quadrupled since then, demonstrating the rapid growth and potential of this young startup.

The founding team’s background is equally impressive. Aidan Smith, a former founder and Thiel fellow, worked at Neuralink during college, while Asher Spector was pursuing his PhD in statistics at Stanford University. Ben Spector, on the other hand, was a computer science PhD student at Stanford and also founded Prod, an almost secret-society startup accelerator that has gained significant recognition for its talent incubation capabilities.

The founders’ work focuses on developing what they call ‘the world’s most complete megakernel framework.’ This innovative technology can perform entire training runs, serve inference, play video games, and even do all three simultaneously in a single kernel. According to the team, their framework has the potential to overlap memory-bound inference with compute-bound training, allowing for more efficient use of computing resources.