Flapping Airplanes funding hits $1 billion at $6 billion value

Flapping Airplanes funding just reached the billion-dollar mark. The San Francisco AI research lab said on Wednesday, Oct. 21, that it had raised a $1 billion Series A co-led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital, at a valuation of about $6 billion according to Bloomberg, as cited by TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE.

What happened

The round comes nine months after a $180 million seed led by GV, Sequoia and Index, which valued the company at $1.5 billion, so its price has roughly quadrupled. Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins returned, and Valor, Atreides, Jump Trading, XTX Ventures and Nvidia are among listed backers. Investors have now put about $1.18 billion into the company, SiliconANGLE said.

The lab was founded by brothers Ben and Asher Spector and Aidan Smith. Ben Spector, the chief executive, is a Stanford computer science PhD student who started the student accelerator Prod at MIT; Asher Spector holds a Stanford statistics doctorate; Smith is a Thiel Fellow who worked at Neuralink. Index's Mark Xu joins the board.

In 2024 Ben Spector was lead author on ThunderKittens, an open-source toolkit for writing fast GPU kernels, SiliconANGLE noted. Sequoia partner David Cahn, an investor, has described the founders as building "the young person's AGI lab," according to TechCrunch, and Index said the team hires for skill and trajectory over age or pedigree.

There is no commercial product yet. The team, a couple of dozen people working in person in San Francisco according to Index, spent much of its first year on new tools for graphics chips. It calls its system "the world's most complete megakernel framework," which runs an entire program on a GPU as one kernel and can train, serve inference and even play a video game at the same time.

Why it matters

The pitch is efficiency. The founders want models that learn from far less data, without "ingesting half the internet," as TechCrunch put it. "A model that's a million times more data efficient is probably a million times easier to put into the economy," Asher Spector told the publication. Index partners argued that AI demand will keep running ahead of compute supply and data, naming robotics, trading and life sciences as markets that need cheaper AI.

Flapping Airplanes funding adds to a run of very large rounds for young AI companies, such as those in our Arena $3.1 billion valuation and Typesafe $7.5 billion valuation stories. The bet is on talent and research, not revenue.

Nvidia's presence on the cap table is notable, since a lab promising to get more out of each chip could, in theory, reduce demand for chips. Investors appear to see better efficiency as a way to widen the market instead.

What's next

TechCrunch said the new cash gives the team room to hire. Index's note on the deal is on its website.

The test will be a first model or product that shows the claimed data savings. Until then, Flapping Airplanes funding is a bet on a small team's research.