Sakana AI Secures $135M Series B Funding
The Japanese startup Sakana AI raised a Series B funding round of 135M, with participation from Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), Khosla Ventures, Macquarie Capital, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Lux Capital, and In-Q-Tel (IQT).
Founded in 2023 by Ren Ito, David Ha ex Google research and Llion Jones a co-author of “Attention Is All You Need,” Sakana AI is an R&D-focused startup in artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on efficiency and sustainability of the technology.
One of its contributions to research in the field is Evolutionary Model Merge, a method that combines multiple models to obtain a specialized model through evolutionary algorithms, without the need for retraining. This enabled them to develop EvoLLM-JP, a Japanese language model; EvoVLM, a vision-and-language model; and EvoSDXL, an image generation model.
In the area of AI agents, they also developed “The AI Scientist”, an agent that aims to automate the entire scientific research process, including generating ideas, searching the literature, writing code, etc.
With this funding, they aim to strengthen their R&D in foundation models and AI applications in Japan, in order to expand across the country and cover more areas such as industry, manufacturing, government, and others.
