Flapping Airplanes raises $1B Series A at reported $6B valuation

Flapping Airplanes, a year-old AI lab working on training large models with less data, has raised a $1 billion Series A co-led by Index and Lux, reportedly valuing the company at $6 billion.

Nine months earlier, the company had launched with $180 million in seed funding from the same three investors — GV, Sequoia, and Index — at a $1.5 billion valuation, meaning Flapping Airplanes’ valuation has quadrupled since then. Those backers returned for the new round alongside Kleiner Perkins, with additional investors including Valor, Atreides, A*, and Nvidia.

The company was founded by Aidan Smith, who previously founded a company, held a Thiel Fellowship, and spent time during college at Neuralink, the brain-implant startup, along with brothers Asher and Ben Spector. Asher Spector holds a statistics PhD from Stanford, while Ben Spector, a Stanford computer science PhD student, founded Prod, a selective, student-run startup accelerator he launched while at MIT.

The founders describe their technology as a “megakernel” framework: a single GPU program that can run training, serve inference, and even play video games simultaneously, overlapping memory-heavy and compute-heavy workloads so the chip rarely sits idle. Their bet is that AI development has barely tapped what GPUs can actually do, and that capable models don’t require ingesting vast swaths of internet data to train. “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 company’s launch.

With the new capital, Flapping Airplanes plans to keep hiring as it tries to prove that thesis at scale.

Why it matters

A venture-backed bet that smaller, more data-efficient training methods — not just more compute — can produce competitive AI models would reshape the economics of building frontier systems.