Flapping Airplanes announced a $1 billion Series A round on Wednesday. Index and Lux co-led the financing, which reportedly valued the year-old AI startup at $6 billion. The company is trying to find ways to train large models with less data.
The round came nine months after Flapping Airplanes launched with $180 million in seed funding from GV, Sequoia, and Index. That round valued the company at $1.5 billion. The reported new valuation is four times as high.
Earlier backers Sequoia, GV, and Kleiner Perkins participated in the Series A. Valor, Atreides, A*, and Nvidia are also investors.
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Aidan Smith founded Flapping Airplanes with brothers Asher and Ben Spector. Smith is a former founder and Thiel fellow who worked at Neuralink during college. Asher was a statistics PhD at Stanford. Ben was a computer science PhD student at Stanford and founded Prod while at MIT.
Prod is a five-year-old, student-run startup accelerator. Sequoia partner David Cahn, an investor in Flapping Airplanes, wrote earlier this year that Prod has “become one of the most powerful talent incubators in Silicon Valley.” He described the founders as building the “young person’s AGI lab.”
The startup builds a megakernel framework
The founders describe their work as “the world’s most complete megakernel framework. It can perform entire training runs, serve inference, play video games, and even do all three simultaneously in a single kernel.” A kernel is a program that runs on a GPU. A megakernel combines many tasks in one program.
They say the framework “can overlap memory-bound inference with compute-bound training.” That means it can pair a task largely waiting for data with one doing calculations, keeping the chip busy more of the time. The founders believe GPUs can be used more fully to build intelligent systems “without ingesting half the internet.”
Their goal is to make AI systems cheaper to train and run. “A model that’s a million times more data efficient is probably a million times easier to put into the economy,” Asher Spector told TechCrunch shortly after the startup launched.
Flapping Airplanes now plans to use the new funding to hire and pursue that goal.
