Four times the value in months
Flapping Airplanes, a San Francisco AI research lab founded in late 2025, has closed a $1 billion funding round. According to Bloomberg, the round was led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital and values the company at $6 billion.
That is roughly four times the lab's valuation in January, meaning it reached a multi-billion-dollar value without shipping a product.
What it is working on
Flapping Airplanes is exploring ways to train AI models with less data and less compute. The approach sits alongside a broader push in the industry to find alternatives to ever-larger data and chip requirements.
The company has no commercial product yet; the size of the round shows investor appetite for research-stage labs remains strong.
