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

Flapping Airplanes Inc., an artificial intelligence research lab, has secured $1 billion in funding, a year after its establishment. The startup was valued at $6 billion in the deal, according to Bloomberg. The lab, yet to release any commercial product, aims to develop AI models that learn from significantly less data compared to current systems.

Over its first year, the company focused on developing new primitives for graphics processing units, which enabled new algorithms with the potential to "dramatically reshape AI's cost structure." The founders have reportedly developed the world's most comprehensive megakernel framework, which can handle a full training run, serve inference, and play a video game simultaneously within a single kernel.

This framework can overlap memory-bound inference with compute-bound training on the same chip. Co-founder Asher Spector, who holds a statistics doctorate from Stanford University, believes that a model a million times more data efficient would be a million times easier to integrate into the economy. The team, consisting of around a dozen people working in San Francisco, includes Asher's brother Ben Spector, the CEO, and Aidan Smith, a Thiel Fellow who previously worked at Neuralink Corp. Index Ventures Management and Lux Capital Management co-led the Series A round, with Sequoia Capital Operations and GV Management Co. also participating.

The valuation of Flapping Airplanes has reportedly quadrupled in the nine months since the seed round, with the company now having raised $1.18 billion in total funding.