Flapping Airplanes announced a $1 billion Series A on October 21, TechCrunch's Julie Bort reported. Index and Lux co-led the round, which Bloomberg reports values the company at $6 billion. The lab launched nine months earlier with a $180 million seed round from GV, Sequoia and Index that valued it at $1.5 billion, so its valuation quadrupled.
Investors
Earlier backers Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins took part in the Series A. The article also lists Valor, Atreides, A* and Nvidia as investors.
The founders and Prod
The article describes Aidan Smith as a former founder and Thiel fellow who worked at Neuralink during college, and Asher Spector and Ben Spector as Stanford PhD students, the latter having founded Prod while at MIT. Prod is a five-year-old, student-run startup accelerator that TechCrunch describes as almost secret-society in nature. Sequoia partner David Cahn, an investor, wrote that Prod has become one of the most powerful talent incubators in Silicon Valley and said the founders are building the young person's AGI lab.
The research bet
The company works on training large models with less data, aiming for systems that cost less to train and run. The founders call their work the world's most complete megakernel framework and claim it can run training, serve inference and handle game-playing workloads within a single kernel, overlapping memory-bound inference with compute-bound training to keep GPUs busy. Their stated goal is building intelligent systems without ingesting half the internet. Asher Spector told TechCrunch shortly after launch: “A model that's a million times more data efficient is probably a million times easier to put into the economy.” These are the founders' claims and not independently tested.
Source: TechCrunch. This is an AI Business Watch summary of the original report.