The one-year-old startup Flapping Airplanes has secured $1 billion in a Series A funding round. The investment was co-led by Index and Lux, bringing the company's valuation to $6 billion. This follows a $180 million seed round completed nine months ago, which had valued the business at $1.5 billion.
The funding round saw participation from existing investors, including Sequoia, GV, and Kleiner Perkins. Additional backers of the company include Valor, Atreides, A*, and Nvidia. The founders, Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector, intend to use the capital to scale operations and further their research.
Flapping Airplanes is developing a megakernel framework designed to optimize GPU utilization. The technology aims to perform training and inference tasks simultaneously within a single kernel. By improving data efficiency, the company seeks to reduce the costs associated with training and running large-scale AI models.
