$1 billion, nine months after $180 million. Flapping Airplanes, an AI lab founded about a year ago, announced a Series A on 21 October, TechCrunch reports, co-led by Index and Lux.
Bloomberg reportedly values the company at $6 billion, roughly four times the $1.5 billion at which its January seed round was priced. That valuation is Bloomberg’s figure, not one the company confirmed.
Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins, earlier backers, took part again. The founders are Aidan Smith, who worked at Neuralink while in college, and the Stanford PhD students Asher and Ben Spector. Nvidia is also listed among the investors, alongside Valor, Atreides and A*.
The pitch is efficiency: train and run models on much less data and compute than the industry uses now, so they cost less to build and operate. The founders describe a megakernel, a single GPU program that bundles many tasks so chips sit idle less, and say it can run training and inference together.
Those capabilities are the founders’ own claims. The report offers no models, benchmarks, customers or revenue, gives no product timeline, and says the money will go towards hiring and turning the research goal into reality.
The warmest endorsement comes from Sequoia’s David Cahn, who is an investor in the company, so it comes from someone with a stake.
A billion dollars buys a great deal of compute to find out. Until a model is shown, the evidence for the efficiency claim is the round itself.
