Flapping Airplanes Lands $1B at $6B From Index and Lux, Four Times Its January Seed Valuation

The year-old San Francisco neolab—founded by Asher Spector, Ben Spector and Aidan Smith—raised $1 billion led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital, with Sequoia, GV, Kleiner Perkins and Nvidia (also a customer-side partner) joining. The round quadruples the $1.5B valuation implied by January's $180M seed. Flapping Airplanes is pre-product and focused on training frontier models with less data and compute, including custom software for Nvidia GPUs.