Year-old AI lab Flapping Airplanes raises $1B at a $6B valuation
AI startup Flapping Airplanes has raised $1 billion in a Series A round, reaching a $6 billion valuation just nine months after its seed round. The company is developing a 'megakernel' framework designed to optimize GPU performance by overlapping memory-bound and compute-bound tasks.
Why it matters
The massive valuation highlights the intense investor appetite for infrastructure-level AI innovations that promise to improve training efficiency for large models.
Year-old startup Flapping Airplanes has wowed Silicon Valley with an impressive founding team and a mission to find ways to train large models with less data. On Wednesday, the company announced it had raised a $1 billion Series A round, co-led by Index and Lux, reportedly at a $6 billion valuation.
The round comes just nine months after the company launched with a $180 million seed round from GV, Sequoia, and Index. That seed round had valued the company at $1.5 billion, so its valuation just quadrupled.
Other participants in the new round included earlier backers Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins. Valor, Atreides, Kleiner Perkins, A*, and Nvidia are also investors in the company.
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