Flapping Airplanes

Data-efficient AI that learns more like humans do, which the company estimates are 100,000 to 1,000,000 times more data-efficient than current models; may require new loss functions and possibly replacing gradient descent.

Founded

2025

Headquarters

San Francisco, CA

Founders

Ben Spector, Asher Spector, Aidan Smith

Pushes against

Ingesting 'half the internet' to train ever larger models.

Now

Research-only for now, with applications in robotics, retail and science as a later goal. Runtime Wire (citing Forbes, 2026-07-31) names the founders as Ben Spector, Asher Spector and Aidan Smith. No public model.

Key people

• Ben Spector (co-founder)
• Asher Spector (co-founder)
• Aidan Smith (co-founder)

Funding

• January 2026 reported

  Amount

  $180M

  Valuation

  ~$1.5B (reported)

  Lead

  GV, Sequoia, Index

  Source the-decoder.com

Every funding round in the atlas

Sources

1. the-decoder.com/two-startups-want-to-replace-how-ai-learns-one-just-raised-180m-another-is
2. runtimewire.com/article/flapping-airplanes-5-billion-valuation-funding-talks

This profile was checked and corrected against its sources on 6 October 2026. How we check