No Product, No Revenue: FlappingAirplanes Hits $6B Valuation in Under a Year
创业邦 · wechat · 2026-10-24
AI startup FlappingAirplanes raised a $1B Series A led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital, with Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins participating, at a $6B valuation—tripling from $1.5B in January, with $1.18B total raised. Founded by the Spector brothers and Thiel Fellow Aidan Smith (three years at Neuralink), the company has no product or revenue and bets on achieving equal intelligence with less data and less compute: new training methods for data efficiency, and Megakernel, a GPU framework that consolidates scattered operations into single large kernels so training, inference and even games share compute and bandwidth, cutting GPU idle time. CEO Ben Spector was first author of the open-source GPU programming framework ThunderKittens.
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