Flapping Airplanes Raises $1 Billion in Series A Funding

Flapping Airplanes raised $1 billion in a Series A to develop a GPU software framework for running AI workloads, nine months after its $180 million seed round.

Announced Oct. 21, the financing carries a reported $6 billion valuation, four times the $1.5 billion attached to the seed round. Index and Lux co-led the Series A, with Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins also participating. Index, Sequoia and GV backed the earlier financing.

Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector founded the company. The founders describe their product as software that coordinates work on graphics processing units (GPUs), chips built for intensive computing. They say it can handle model training, inference and other computing tasks within one program, including jobs that rely heavily on memory and jobs that require substantial computation.

Flapping Airplanes aims to reduce the cost of training and operating AI systems. It plans to use the new capital to hire.