Flapping Airplanes raises $1B at $6B with no product, as AI 'neolabs' draw frontier-lab money

What's the deal? Flapping Airplanes, a San Francisco AI research lab founded in late 2025, has raised a $1 billion Series A at a $6 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported. Index Ventures and Lux Capital co-led, with earlier backers Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins joining. Index's Mark Xu joins the board, Index said.

Why it stands out: The company has no product and no revenue, and only "a couple dozen people", per Index. Its valuation has quadrupled in nine months, from $1.5 billion when it launched with a $180 million seed round in January, TechCrunch reports. Dealroom data puts the round in the top 1% by amount of 3,497 comparable early-stage US deep tech rounds.

What are they building? Founders Ben and Asher Spector and Aidan Smith want to train models with far less data and compute. Their bet is "megakernels": one program that runs a whole job on a GPU, which they say can overlap training and inference so chips are rarely idle. "A model that's a million times more data efficient is probably a million times easier to put into the economy," Asher Spector told TechCrunch. Co-founder Aidan Smith has said, according to Bloomberg, that the company is writing its own code to run Nvidia's GPUs more efficiently. TechCrunch lists Nvidia, Valor, Atreides and A* among its investors.

The bigger picture: Flapping Airplanes is one of a growing group of "neolabs", research-first startups that raise frontier-lab money before they have a product, alongside the likes of Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines Lab. Its pitch is efficiency: getting more out of each chip just as investors start asking how long the data-centre spending boom can last. The risk is just as clear. At $6 billion with no revenue, the valuation rests entirely on research that has yet to be proven outside the lab.

Sources: Bloomberg · TechCrunch · Index Ventures · Quartz

Image credit: Flapping Airplanes