Flapping Airplanes AI lab secures $1 billion funding round

Flapping Airplanes just closed a $1 billion Series A, pushing its valuation to $6 billion. The round, co‑led by Index and Lux, also brought back Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins. That’s a jump from a $180 million seed just nine months earlier, which had valued the startup at $1.5 billion. Founders Aidan Smith, former Neuralink fellow, and Stanford brothers Asher and Ben Spector built what they call a ‘megakernel’ framework. The megakernel can train models, serve inference and even run video games all inside a single GPU program. They claim it overlaps memory‑bound inference with compute‑heavy training so the chip never idles. The goal is to cut data needs dramatically. They say a model a million times more data‑efficient would be a million times easier to commercialize. Asher Spector told TechCrunch a million‑fold efficiency could finally bring AI into the broader economy.