Year-old AI research lab Flapping Airplanes raises $1B at a reported $6B valuation

Year-old AI research lab Flapping Airplanes raises $1B at a reported $6B valuation

Artificial intelligence research lab Flapping Airplanes Inc. today announced it has raised $1 billion in new funding, about a year after it was founded.

Investors valued the startup at $6 billion in the deal, Bloomberg reported. No commercial product has come out of the lab yet.

Flapping Airplanes is trying to build AI models that learn from far less data than today’s frontier systems consume. Most of its first year went into new primitives for graphics processing units. That work, according to the company’s announcement on X, enables new algorithms that could “dramatically reshape AI’s cost structure.”

The founders have built what they describe as “the world’s most complete megakernel framework.” Index Ventures Management’s post on the round says a megakernel runs an entire program on a GPU as a single kernel, so the chip stops losing time between steps. Flapping Airplanes says its framework can handle a full training run, serve inference and play a video game at the same time inside one kernel. Memory-bound inference can then overlap with compute-bound training on the same chip.

“A model that’s a million times more data efficient is probably a million times easier to put into the economy,” co-founder Asher Spector told TechCrunch. Spector holds a statistics doctorate from Stanford University.

His brother Ben Spector, the chief executive, started the student-run startup accelerator Prod while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is now a computer science doctoral student at Stanford. In 2024 he was lead author on ThunderKittens, an open-source toolkit for writing fast GPU kernels. Aidan Smith, the third co-founder and a Thiel Fellow, worked at Neuralink Corp. during college. Index describes a team of a couple dozen people working in person in San Francisco.

Index and Lux Capital Management co-led the Series A round. Mark Xu of Index is joining the board. Sequoia Capital Operations and GV Management Co. joined Index in the $180 million seed round in January, and both returned for this one. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Valor Equity Partners LP, Atreides Management LP, Jump Trading Group, XTX Ventures and Nvidia Corp. also appear on the list of institutional backers the company posted on X.

Xu and Shardul Shah, also of Index, argued that demand for AI will keep outrunning the supply of compute and data. Robotics, trading and life sciences were the markets they singled out as needing more efficient AI.

By Bloomberg’s count, the valuation has roughly quadrupled in the nine months since the seed round. Investors have now put $1.18 billion into the company.

Image: Flapping Airplanes