FILE PHOTO: Tokyo-based startup Sakana AI has announced its Series A funding round of around $137 million.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
Tokyo-based startup Sakana AI has announced its Series A funding round of around $137 million. Chipmaker Nvidia has emerged as the biggest investor in the startup, along side Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and other investors, per a Nikkei report.
The report shared that Nvidia will collaborate with the AI startup around promoting research and development and training AI talent in Japan.
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang released a statement around the announcement saying, “The team at Sakana is helping spur the democratization of AI in Japan by developing cutting-edge foundation models to automate and speed scientific discovery with Nvidia’s accelerated computing platform.”
In August, the startup created a buzz with the release of its new AI model dubbed as an AI Scientist which can perform end-to-end research starting from reading existing literature on a problem to writing a paper and even conducting peer reviews and evaluating its own results.
The startup was founded in July 2023 by ex-Googlers David Ha and Llion Jones, and Ren Ito, who was previously at AI image generating startup Stability AI. Notably, Jones was also one of the eight authors behind the pivotal research paper on ‘Transformers,’ which played a pivotal role in most advances in artificial intelligence.
Early this year in January, Sakana AI raised about 4.5 billion yen or $30 million from NTT Group, Sony Group and Khosla Ventures among others. The startup then became the fastest company founded from scratch in Japan to touch unicorn status.
