FLAPPING AIRPLANES RAISES $1 BILLION IN SERIES A ROUND

Flapping Airplanes announced on Wednesday that it had raised $1 billion in a Series A funding round. Index and Lux co-led the investment, which reportedly valued the year-old artificial intelligence startup at $6 billion. The round came nine months after Flapping Airplanes launched with $180 million in seed funding. GV, Sequoia and Index backed that earlier round, which valued the company at $1.5 billion.

Flapping Airplanes says it aims to train large AI models using less data than current approaches require. Its proposed methods include synthetic data generation, curriculum learning and reasoning systems inspired by physics. The company says it wants to use simulations and smaller, selected datasets in place of extensive web scraping. It argues that this approach could help models reason more reliably, produce fewer false answers and learn new skills from less data.

The reported valuation is four times the figure attached to Flapping Airplanes’ seed round. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta are among the developers pursuing large models in the same market. Backers cite the cost of acquiring and filtering data, alongside large training runs, as reasons for their interest in the company’s approach. Experts have cautioned that Flapping Airplanes has yet to prove its methods at the scale used for leading AI systems.