Nvidia-Backed Sakana AI to Build ‘World-Class AI Lab’ in Japan

Tokyo-based artificial intelligence firm Sakana AI raised over $100 million in a Series A funding round and formed a collaboration with Nvidia.

The funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates, Khosla Ventures and Lux Capital, with participation from Nvidia, Sakana AI said in a Wednesday (Sept. 4) blog post.

Sakana AI aims to build “a world-class AI lab” in Japan to help the country and its allies meet the challenges they are facing, including a declining population, decreased competitiveness and growing geopolitical tensions, according to the post.

“With the resources gathered from our Series A, we aim to continue to invest in talent and build one of the highest talent-dense AI companies,” Sakana AI said in the post. “We will also continue to invest heavily in developing our infrastructure, which will be critical in our mission to advancing nature-inspired, sustainable and energy-efficient AI technologies.”

Sakana AI’s collaboration with Nvidia will focus on research, infrastructure and AI community building in Japan, according to the post.

Together, the two companies aim to devise new techniques for efficiently developing foundation models, ensure Japan has a competitive advantage in AI development using Nvidia’s latest technologies, and develop Japan’s AI community through events, hackathons and university outreach, per the post.

“Countries are embracing Sovereign AI to capture and codify their data, culture and language through their own unique large language models,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in the post. “The team at Sakana AI is helping spur the democratization of AI in Japan by developing cutting-edge foundation models to automate and speed up scientific discovery with Nvidia’s accelerated computing platform.”

Sakana AI has introduced several AI models for Japanese speakers this year, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.

The AI startup was launched out of stealth in August 2023 by Llion Jones, one of the eight Google researchers famous for introducing the foundational architecture of transformer neural networks, a piece of research that supports and informs nearly all of the capabilities of today’s AI models.

Jones reportedly said at the time that he didn’t want Sakana AI to be “just another company with an LLM.”

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