A year-old artificial intelligence startup, Flapping Airplanes, disclosed Wednesday that it had raised a $1 billion Series A funding round, valuing the company at $6 billion. The round was co-led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital, GV, Kleiner Perkins, Valor, Atreides, A* and Nvidia. The company had previously raised $180 million in seed funding nine months earlier, which had valued it at $1.5 billion. That earlier round included GV, Sequoia and Index as investors.

Flapping Airplanes was founded by Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector. Smith previously founded a startup and was a Thiel Fellow, and he worked at Neuralink during his college years. Asher Spector earned a statistics doctorate from Stanford University, while Ben Spector was a computer science doctoral student at Stanford and founded a student-run startup accelerator called Prod while at MIT.

David Cahn, a Sequoia Capital partner who invested in Flapping Airplanes, described the founders as building what he called the "young person's AGI lab," emphasizing their focus on creating advanced artificial intelligence systems with limited resources. The company describes its technology as a "megakernel framework" that can manage multiple computational tasks within a single GPU program. This approach aims to improve efficiency by overlapping memory-intensive inference operations with compute-heavy training processes, reducing idle GPU time.

The founders argue that current AI development relies on consuming vast amounts of data and computational power, but their framework seeks to achieve significant progress without requiring such extensive resources. Asher Spector stated after the company's launch that a model requiring a million times less data would also be far easier to deploy in practical applications. The new funding will support hiring and the development of systems intended to realize this goal.

Julie Bort serves as the Startups/Venture Desk editor for TechCrunch. Inquiries can be directed to [email protected] or via @Julie188 on X.