Flapping Airplanes announced a 6 billion valuation, nine months after a 1.5 billion from GV, Sequoia, and Index.
Backers include Sequoia, GV, Kleiner Perkins, Valor, Atreides, A*, and Nvidia. Founders Aidan Smith (ex-Neuralink, Thiel fellow) and brothers Asher and Ben Spector (Stanford statistics and CS PhDs; Ben founded MIT accelerator Prod) pitch a “megakernel” framework that overlaps memory-bound inference with compute-bound training in one GPU program.
The team claims the stack can run training, inference, and even games simultaneously, aiming for models far more data-efficient than web-scale ingestion—“a million times more data efficient” eases economic deployment, Asher Spector told TechCrunch at launch.