Year-old startup Flapping Airplanes has raised a staggering $1 billion in a Series A round, valuing the company at a whopping $6 billion. Co-led by Index and Lux, the round comes just nine months after a $180 million seed round, quadrupling the company’s valuation.

The founders, Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector, bring a powerful team to the table, combining academic prowess and industry experience. Asher’s PhD in statistics from Stanford and Ben’s work at MIT and Prod, a secret-society startup accelerator, make the team formidable.

Their megakernel framework claims to overlap memory-bound inference with compute-bound training, aiming to create more data-efficient AI systems. The goal is to train models that cost less to run, making AI more accessible to the economy.

“A model that’s a million times more data efficient is probably a million times easier to put into the economy,” Asher Spector explained. With this fresh influx of funds, the team is poised to hire and pursue their ambitious goals.