Flapping Airplanes, a San Francisco AI research lab founded in late 2025, announced on Wednesday, Oct. 21, that it raised a $1 billion Series A at a reported $6 billion valuation.
Why it matters: The valuation quadrupled in nine months, from $1.5 billion at its $180 million seed round in January, and the lab still has no commercial product.
Who's paying
- Index Ventures and Lux Capital co-led the round. Index partner Mark Xu joins the board.
- Earlier backers Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins returned. Nvidia is also an investor.
- Total funding is now about $1.18 billion, SiliconANGLE reported, citing Bloomberg.
What it is building
The lab is working on ways to train large AI models with less data and computing power, and on getting more out of the Nvidia chips that run them. Co-founder Aidan Smith said it has written its own version of the software that runs Nvidia GPUs, Tech Funding News reported. Those performance claims have not been shown in a product.
Smith founded the lab with brothers Asher and Ben Spector, both of whom studied at Stanford, according to TechCrunch.