Legora raises $550 million at $8.8 billion valuation
Atreides Management led the legal AI startup’s Series E, with the proceeds intended to support further expansion across North America.
Flapping Airplanes lands $1 billion round at reported $6 billion valuation
The AI lab is pursuing models that need less training data, with the aim of lowering training and operating costs.
AI startup Flapping Airplanes said on October 21, 2026, that it had secured $1 billion through a Series A round co-led by Lux and Index. A media report put its valuation at $6 billion.
Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins returned as investors in the financing. Nine months before the latest round, the company launched with $180 million in seed funding backed by Index, GV and Sequoia, carrying a valuation of $1.5 billion.
Aidan Smith and brothers Ben and Asher Spector founded the lab to pursue large models requiring less data for training. They aim to make the systems cheaper both to develop and to operate.
The founders say their technology bundles GPU tasks into a single program, known as a megakernel. They describe a framework capable of training models, handling inference and playing video games simultaneously. They also claim it can pair work that waits on data with work focused on computation, leaving the chip idle less often.