Year-old AI lab Flapping Airplanes raises $1B at a $6B valuation

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Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. 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. Flapping Airplanes was founded by Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector. Smith is a former founder and Thiel fellow who worked at the brain implant company Neuralink during college. Asher Spector was a statistics PhD at Stanford, while Ben Spector was a computer science PhD student at Stanford and founded Prod while at MIT. Prod is an almost secret-society, five-year-old student-run startup accelerator that has “become one of the most powerful talent incubators in Silicon Valley,” wrote Sequoia partner David Cahn, a Flapping Planes investor, in a post earlier this year explaining why he invested. Together, the founders “are building the ‘young person’s AGI lab,’” as Cahn described it.