Sakana AI scores $100M to challenge OpenAI, Anthropic

The AI frenzy is taking over the world. Mere days after China’s Alibaba made headlines with Qwen2-VL, Sakana AI, the Japanese startup founded by former Google researchers David Ha and Llion Jones and former diplomat Ren Ito, has announced it has raised $100 million in a series A round of funding.

The investment has been led by several industry heavyweights, including New Enterprise Associates, Khosla Ventures and Lux Capital, with participation from Nvidia–signaling strong traction for the year-old company. It says it will use the capital as well as infrastructure support from Nvidia to further advance its technologies and grow into a world-class AI research lab taking on frontier labs, including those of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Announcing the round on X, Ha emphasized the company is already operating much faster than most AI labs globally and has plans to “push the frontiers of what’s possible with AI” in the coming days.

What Sakana AI has been up to?

Sakana made a striking appearance last year with its high-profile founders and a novel, nature-inspired collective intelligence approach to developing high-performing foundation models. The idea was to bring the best of multiple smaller AI models together, much like a swarm, to deliver complex results.

Based on this unique approach, and native Japanese datasets, the company came up with multiple models, including those capable of generating Japan’s traditional ukiyo-e artwork. Most recently, it shared research on the AI Scientist, an LLM-based system that automates the entire research lifecycle, right from ideation, writing code, running experiments and summarizing results to writing entire papers and conducting peer-review.

As the next step in this work, Sakana AI is looking to scale up its nature-inspired approach to AI development. With the series A capital coming from leading venture capital firms and Nvidia, the company plans to speed up hiring and build a “talent-dense” AI research organization. It will also infuse the resources into scaling up the infrastructure of the company in partnership with Nvidia. 

In a blog post published today, Sakana said the Jensen Huang company will offer infrastructure support on two fronts. First, it will provide the latest GPU systems to develop advanced models using novel techniques and then it will give access to Nvidia-powered data centers within Japan for running experiments. 

The GPU giant will also help Sakana run local community and talent-building initiatives like AI hackathons and university outreach programs.

The ultimate goal, Sakana says, is to build a world-class AI lab in Japan to produce advanced and energy-efficient AI technologies that can help the country and its allies cope with the challenges of the 21st century, including declining population, decreased competitiveness, and increasing geopolitical tensions.

“This is a daunting task, especially for a small startup company, which will require years of R&D and building long-term relationships with key stakeholders in the nation…We believe our technology will help Japan regain a technological edge in AI, and increase its global competitiveness. We also aim to deploy our technology to assist Japan, its institutions and its citizens to overcome its (AI) challenges in the road ahead,” the company noted.

Rivals are already eyeing growth in Japan 

While Sakana continues to gain traction with its unique approach to AI development and exclusive focus on Japan, OpenAI, which is often hailed as the category leader, is also moving to expand its footprint in the country. The Sam Altman-led research lab launched a Tokyo hub in April and has already released a custom GPT-4 model optimized for the Japanese language. Just recently, OpenAI Japan’s president Tadao Nagasaki also teased a new AI model called GPT-Next and said it will be 100x better than the current version.

Other than that, Canada-based enterprise AI startup Cohere is also building a custom Japanese model on top of Command R+ in partnership with Fujitsu.

Despite the shifting dynamics, investors are bullish on the potential of Sakana. Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures, noted that while many labs globally are trying to catch up, they are using the same techniques to train foundation models as everyone else.

Sakana AI, on the other hand, is showing the “path to innovation.”