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

Flapping Airplanes, a year-old San Francisco AI research lab, raised a $1 billion Series A round, TechCrunch reported. The company announced the round on Wednesday, Oct. 21. TechCrunch says it was co-led by Index and Lux, reportedly at a $6 billion valuation.\n\nA Series A is usually a startup's first big round from venture capital firms. A valuation is the price investors put on the company in a deal. Here the figure comes from reporting: SiliconANGLE, citing Bloomberg, wrote that investors valued the startup at $6 billion. The sources provided do not say the company confirmed that number.\n\n## Who is in the round\n\nBloomberg reported that Index Ventures and Lux Capital led the financing. Other participants included Sequoia Capital, Alphabet Inc.'s GV and Kleiner Perkins, according to Bloomberg. SiliconANGLE reported that Mark Xu of Index is joining the board.\n\n## A fast step up\n\nThe round comes nine months after Flapping Airplanes launched with a $180 million seed round from GV, Sequoia and Index, TechCrunch reported. A seed round is an early round of funding. That one valued the company at $1.5 billion, so the valuation has roughly quadrupled, TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE both say. SiliconANGLE adds that investors have now put $1.18 billion into the company.\n\n## What the company does\n\nAccording to aiweekly.co, Flapping Airplanes is pre-product, meaning it has not released a product. Its focus is training frontier models with less data and less computing power. It also builds custom software for Nvidia GPUs, the chips widely used to train AI. aiweekly.co names the founders as Asher Spector, Ben Spector and Aidan Smith.\n\nHeadlines from other outlets frame the pitch around efficiency. Tech Funding News said the money is meant to make every AI chip work harder. Open Magazine asked whether the company can make AI's expensive habit cheaper. The sources available to us do not give further detail on how the company will spend the money or what it plans to build.\n\n## Why it matters\n\nThe round shows how much capital investors are putting behind a lab that, per aiweekly.co, has no product yet. The valuation is a reported figure, and the company's approach to training with less data and compute has yet to be shown in a released product.\n\nWhat to watch next is whether Flapping Airplanes confirms its valuation and what it releases after this round.