Technology and Scienceupdated 1h ago2 min read
Flapping Airplanes Raises $1 Billion Series A Co-Led by Index and Lux, Valued at $6 Billion
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$1 billion Series A raised, led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital. Valuation at $6 billion, quadrupling from January.
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Series A for megakernel AI
Flapping Airplanes announced it raised $1 billion in a Series A round co-led by Index and Lux, valuing the AI startup at $6 billion. The round came nine months after the company launched with a $180 million seed round from GV, Sequoia, and Index, which valued it at $1.5 billion. The $6 billion valuation counted the fresh capital and valued the year-old company at four times its January level.
Flapping Airplanes said the lab had not yet produced a commercial product and that it was trying to build AI models that learn from far less data than today’s frontier systems consume. The founders describe their work as “the world’s most complete megakernel framework.”
Megakernel aims to cut costs
Flapping Airplanes said its megakernel framework can perform entire training runs, serve inference, play video games, and even do all three simultaneously in a single kernel. The founders claim the framework “can overlap memory-bound inference with compute-bound training,” so the chip is rarely sitting idle. Index describes a megakernel as running an entire program on a GPU as a single kernel, so the chip stops losing time between steps.
Flapping Airplanes said the company is pursuing ways to train AI models using less data and computing power, and to improve the efficiency of the chips that develop and run them. Asher Spector told TechCrunch that a model “a million times more data efficient is probably a million times easier to put into the economy.”
Backers, founders, and next steps
Sequoia Capital, Alphabet $GOOGL's GV, and Kleiner Perkins took part in the round, and Nvidia $NVDA counts itself among the company’s backers. Index and Lux Capital Management co-led the Series A round and Mark Xu of Index was joining the board. Aidan Smith, a Thiel Fellow who worked at Neuralink during college, co-founded the company, and it said Asher Spector held a statistics doctorate from Stanford.
Spector told Bloomberg that “The basic thesis is demand for AI is going to outpace chip and data supply,” and it said a 10% performance boost for every chip would be worth a great deal economically. The founders now have a fresh $1 billion to hire and attempt to turn their goal of cheaper AI training and use into reality.