Year-old startup Flapping Airplanes has wowed Silicon Valley with an impressive founding team and a mission to find ways to train large models with less data. On Wednesday, the company announced it had raised a $1 billion Series A round, co-led by Index and Lux, reportedly at a $6 billion valuation.

The round comes just nine months after the company launched with a $180 million seed round from GV, Sequoia, and Index. That seed round had valued the company at $1.5 billion, so its valuation just quadrupled.

Other participants in the new round included earlier backers Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins. Valor, Atreides, Kleiner Perkins, A*, and Nvidia are also investors in the company.

Flapping Airplanes was founded by Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector. Smith is a former founder and Thiel fellow who worked at the brain implant company Neuralink during college. Asher Spector was a statistics PhD at Stanford, while Ben Spector was a computer science PhD student at Stanford and founded Prod while at MIT.

Prod is an almost secret-society, five-year-old student-run startup accelerator that has “become one of the most powerful talent incubators in Silicon Valley,” wrote Sequoia partner David Cahn, a Flapping Planes investor, in a post earlier this year explaining why he invested. Together, the founders “are building the ‘young person’s AGI lab,’” as Cahn described it.

The founders describe their work as “the world’s most complete megakernel framework.

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