Flapping Airplanes Raises $1 Billion to Solve AI Data Inefficiency
AI-generated image · Bay Street Wire
The startup's $6 billion valuation signals a shift toward architectural efficiency over brute-force data ingestion.
Flapping Airplanes has raised $1 billion in a Series A round co-led by Index and Lux, according to TechCrunch. The funding values the year-old startup at $6 billion, a fourfold increase from its $1.5 billion valuation during a $180 million seed round nine months ago involving GV, Sequoia, and Index.
Founded by Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector, the lab aims to develop intelligent systems without the need to ingest massive amounts of internet data. The founders are developing a "megakernel framework" designed to bundle multiple tasks—including training runs, inference, and gaming—into a single program that runs on a GPU. By overlapping memory-bound inference with compute-bound training, the founders claim they can minimize GPU idle time and create models that are significantly more data efficient.
Asher Spector told TechCrunch that increasing data efficiency makes models easier to integrate into the economy. The company's investors include Nvidia, Valor, Atreides, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, and GV. Sequoia partner David Cahn described the venture as the "young person's AGI lab."