[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] Flapping Airplanes, a one-year-old AI startup, has raised a $1 billion Series A round, TechCrunch reported on Tuesday.

The report said Index and Lux co-led the investment. The company was reported to be valued at $6 billion.

Flapping Airplanes launched nine months ago after receiving $180 million in seed funding from GV, Sequoia and Index. Its valuation at the time was $1.5 billion. That implies its valuation has quadrupled in nine months.

Existing investors including Sequoia, GV and Kleiner Perkins also took part in the round. Nvidia was also listed among the investors.

Flapping Airplanes is focusing on developing technology to train large models with less data.

The founders highlight a technology they call a "megakernel". A program that runs on a GPU is called a kernel, and typically a separate kernel is run for each task. A megakernel bundles multiple tasks into a single program and processes them at once. The company says this lets it train models, run services and execute video games at the same time.

The founders say AI still does not fully draw on GPU performance. They say the megakernel can keep GPUs from sitting idle, and that it can build intelligent systems without using half the internet as training data. Flapping Airplanes aims to develop AI systems with lower training and operating costs.