Flapping Airplanes announced a $1 billion Series A on Oct. 21, while Bloomberg reported a $6 billion valuation, four times the value reported for its January seed financing.
The company said Index Ventures and Lux Capital co-led the round. Bloomberg reported that Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins also participated. Index Ventures, Sequoia and GV had backed the earlier financing, TechCrunch reported.
TechCrunch reported that the January seed round raised $180 million and, in a February recap, put the company’s valuation at $1.5 billion. The new financing came nine months later.
Aidan Smith founded the company with brothers Asher and Ben Spector. Flapping Airplanes is developing software to coordinate work across graphics processing units (GPUs), chips used for intensive computing. The founders say the software can support model training, inference and other computing workloads through one program. Index Ventures has described the company’s work as an effort to improve efficiency in AI computing.
