Lab

Verified 27 October 2026

Flapping Airplanes

A San Francisco foundational AI research lab working on the data efficiency problem: building models that learn from far less data and compute than today's frontier systems.

It was founded in late 2025 by brothers Ben and Asher Spector and Aidan Smith. In January 2026 it raised a $180 million seed round from GV, Sequoia and Index Ventures, reportedly at a $1.5 billion valuation. Its founders describe the brain as "the floor, not the ceiling" for AI and say they aim for models far more data-efficient than current ones, reportedly by about 1,000x.

In October 2026 Bloomberg and others reported a $1 billion Series A co-led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital at about a $6 billion valuation, with Sequoia, GV, Kleiner Perkins and Nvidia among the investors. The lab has no product or revenue yet and a team of a couple dozen people; its work includes "megakernels" and its own code for running Nvidia GPUs more efficiently.