- Flapping Airplanes raised a $1B Series A at a $6B valuation, four times its January level.
- Index and Lux co-led. Sequoia, GV, and Kleiner Perkins joined, and Nvidia is also an investor.
- The year-old lab has no product yet and is betting on doing more with less data and compute.
Nine months ago, Flapping Airplanes introduced itself with a $180 million seed round that valued it at $1.5 billion. On October 21, the San Francisco lab said it had raised a $1 billion Series A at a $6 billion valuation. It still has no product on sale.
Index Ventures and Lux Capital co-led the round, as first reported by Bloomberg. Sequoia Capital, Alphabet’s GV, and Kleiner Perkins also took part. TechCrunch lists Valor, A*, Nvidia, and Atreides, the firm that led Legora’s $550 million Series E, among the company’s other investors. The valuation includes the new money, and total funding now stands at $1.18 billion. Index partner Mark Xu joins the board.
Asher Spector, his brother Ben Spector, and Aidan Smith founded the lab in late 2025.
A vision that chips and data will run short
The lab is building ways to train models with less data and computing power. Smith said it has also written its own version of the software that runs Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), so the chips can be used more efficiently and flexibly.
The founders describe the result as the most complete megakernel framework. A kernel is a program that runs on a GPU, and a megakernel packs many jobs, such as training and inference, into one so the chip is rarely idle. Those are the founders’ claims, and the company has not shown them in a product.
Index sees the software as good news for chipmakers too. In its post on the round, Xu and fellow partner Shardul Shah argue that megakernels cut wasted time between steps and make today’s chips more flexible and more valuable. Nvidia is an investor, but a stake does not tie a startup to its hardware.
Tech Funding News reported in June that Odyssey raised $310 million and bet on Amazon and AMD chips instead after taking Nvidia’s money.
Why investors are paying for the founders
Ben Spector, the CEO, is a Stanford computer science PhD student who founded Prod, a student-run startup accelerator. Index says his work there helped shape companies including Cursor, Mercor, Etched, and Decart. Asher Spector finished a statistics PhD at Stanford. Smith is a Thiel fellow who spent three years at Neuralink while studying at Georgia Tech.
Sequoia partner David Cahn, who has known Asher and Ben Spector for years, called it a “young person’s AGI lab” in a January note on the seed round. He was blunter on the new round. “There are so many of these AI labs that you can get lost in the noise. But this is not a one-of-many company; this is a one-of-one company,” Cahn said.
Lux partner Brandon Reeves said “getting more out of what we have” will be crucial for “the next frontier” of AI development. The startup is “probably best positioned to do that,” he said. Index describes a team of a couple of dozen people working in person in San Francisco, run like “a test kitchen for frontier AI.”
A $6B price on research
Flapping Airplanes belongs to a growing group of “neolabs”, startups that do research before building products. The Next Web counts Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs, which raised about $1 billion in March, and Mirendil, which raised $200 million in June, among them. Bloomberg reported that Nvidia’s July investment in Safe Superintelligence was worth $5 billion, though the companies did not disclose terms. In October, TypeSafe AI raised about $870 million at a $7.5 billion valuation in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. It builds Jev, a model for automating tasks inside software that is not a chatbot, and says about a third of Fortune 500 companies use it.
Most of the money is buying capacity. Gartner forecasts worldwide AI spending of $2.7 trillion in 2026, up 49.5%, with hyperscalers and service providers buying AI-optimised servers as the largest single category. Flapping Airplanes is selling the opposite premise in a jumpy market.
As TFN reported, chip stocks in the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index had lost more than $1.6 trillion in market value in under two weeks, according to Reuters, while investors questioned the debt behind AI data centres. Chip startups such as Bolt Graphics are still raising to challenge Nvidia and AMD directly.
The performance claims are the founders’ own. Asher Spector told TechCrunch in February that he could not give a timeline for commercialisation. He told Bloomberg the lab plans to sell its technology eventually, to make AI cheaper for other companies to use.
The proof will be measured speed-ups on chips customers already own. Until the lab publishes them, the $6 billion rests on who is building it.
