Flapping Airplanes raises $1B at reported $6B valuation to train AI models on less data
The year-old lab's bet is that models needing far less data would be much easier to deploy across the economy.
Flapping Airplanes, a lab that is only about a year old, has closed a $1 billion Series A at a reported $6 billion valuation, co-led by Index and Lux. The raise comes nine months after its $180 million seed round, which valued the company at $1.5 billion, meaning the valuation has roughly quadrupled. Earlier backers Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins returned, and Valor, Atreides, A* and Nvidia are also named as investors. The company is built around reducing the amount of data needed to train large models, with the founders arguing that much more data-efficient systems would be far easier to deploy across the economy. The funding will go toward hiring and pursuing that goal.
Why it matters
For people who follow the AI industry, the round shows investors are willing to pay heavily for an approach that cuts the data large models need, rather than only for scale. The valuation has roughly quadrupled since the nine-month-old seed round, a sign of how quickly confidence in the company has grown. Whether data efficiency becomes a real route to wider use of these models is the question the funding now puts to the lab.
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Sources
- TechCrunch