Year-old startup Flapping Airplanes has captured attention in Silicon Valley with its impressive founding team and a mission to train large models using 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. This funding round comes just nine months after the company launched with a $180 million seed round from GV, Sequoia, and Index, which had valued the company at $1.5 billion, marking a quadrupling of its valuation.
Investors and Founders
Other participants in the new funding round included earlier backers Sequoia, GV, and Kleiner Perkins. New investors such as Valor, Atreides, Kleiner Perkins, A*, and Nvidia have also joined the ranks.
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 holds a PhD in statistics from Stanford, while Ben Spector was a computer science PhD student at Stanford and founded Prod, a student-run startup accelerator at MIT. Prod has been described as an almost secretive, five-year-old organization that has become one of the most powerful talent incubators in Silicon Valley, according to David Cahn, a partner at Sequoia and a Flapping Airplanes investor.
