Index Ventures

Headlines · 3

1. 3d
   Cowboy Space Unveils Big Iron Express Orbital Data Center Rocket

   Cowboy Space unveiled Big Iron Express, a purpose-built rocket designed to carry five racks of NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs into orbit, and plans to offer it as a launch service competing with SpaceX. A SpaceX launch also carried Google’s experimental satellite, which will send simple requests to Gemini while testing four TPUs in space, alongside Cowboy Space’s Reason-1 satellite. Starcloud is pursuing the broader orbital-compute market with Benchmark backing and a reported valuation of $2.3 billion.

   Newcomer · 🔥 0
2. Oct 21
   Flapping Airplanes Raises $1B at $6B Valuation

   Flapping Airplanes raised $1 billion in new funding at a reported $6 billion valuation, led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital, GV, Kleiner Perkins and others. The AI research startup has not released a commercial product and is pursuing models that use less training data, along with GPU software intended to improve chip efficiency. Its claims about a megakernel framework and overlapping training and inference remain largely unvalidated in independent testing.

   SiliconANGLE AI · 🔥 0
3. Oct 21
   Fireworks AI in early talks to raise at $30B–$40B valuation

   Business Insider, in a report relayed by 智东西, said AI infrastructure startup Fireworks AI is in preliminary talks to raise a new funding round at a company valuation of $30 billion to $40 billion. The reported range is far above the $17.5 billion valuation from its July Series D round, which 智东西 calculated would represent an increase of roughly 71% to 129%. People familiar with the matter said negotiations are still at an early stage and the final valuation could change, and Fireworks AI declined to comment; the talks follow the company's October 9 disclosure of a security incident in which an intruder used internal credentials and may have exposed a small number of customer API keys.

   智东西 · 🔥 0

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