Flapping Airplanes, a startup barely a year old, has raised a $1 billion Series A round co-led by Index and Lux, reportedly valuing the company at $6 billion.

The round lands just nine months after the company launched with a $180 million seed from GV, Sequoia and Index - a round that valued it at $1.5 billion, meaning its valuation has roughly quadrupled. Earlier backers Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins joined the new round, along with Valor, Atreides, A* and Nvidia.

The company was founded by Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector. Smith is a former founder and Thiel fellow who worked at Neuralink during college; Asher Spector was a statistics PhD at Stanford, and Ben Spector was a computer science PhD student there who founded Prod, a five-year-old student-run startup accelerator, while at MIT. Sequoia partner David Cahn, an investor, described the founders as building the "young person's AGI lab."

Flapping Airplanes is chasing cheaper training and inference. Its founders describe their work as "the world's most complete megakernel framework," capable of performing entire training runs, serving inference, playing video games, or all three at once in a single kernel. They claim it can overlap memory-bound inference with compute-bound training so the chip rarely sits idle, with the premise that GPUs are far from fully exploited - and that intelligent systems can be built "without ingesting half the internet." Asher Spector has said a model "a million times more data efficient is probably a million times easier to put into the economy." The fresh $1 billion is earmarked for hiring and turning that goal into reality.

Source: TechCrunch