Nvidia Invests in Japanese AI Startup Sakana AI's $100 Million Funding Round

Nvidia Invests in Japanese AI Company's $100 Million Funding Round

Nvidia is investing in Sakana AI and partnering with the artificial-intelligence research company to spur AI development in Japan. Sakana AI, founded by Google engineers in 2023, announced the collaboration with the U.S. chip giant on Wednesday, saying it raised over $100 million from a group of investors. The series A round was led by venture-capital firms New Enterprise Associates, Khosla Ventures and Lux Capital. The Tokyo-based company previously raised $30 million in a seed funding round led by Lux Capital in January. Sakana AI said it will work with Nvidia on artificial-intelligence research, data centers, and AI community building in Japan. The AI lab is developing technology aimed at automating the development of foundation models, based on nature-inspired ideas. "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," Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said in a statement.

Nvidia Joins $100 Million Funding for Year-Old Japan AI Startup

(Bloomberg) -- Nvidia Corp. has joined a $100 million-plus funding round for Tokyo startup Sakana AI, one of the larger investments the US chipmaker has made so far in Japan's fledgling artificial intelligence arena. Sakana, founded in 2023 by a pair of former Google engineers, secured the Series A or early-stage financing led by New Enterprise Associates, Khosla Ventures and Lux Capital. The startup said it will team up with Nvidia on research, data center access and "AI community-building" locally. Sakana -- which means "fish" in Japanese -- sets out to train low-cost generative AI models using small datasets. Its team unveiled several AI models for Japanese speakers this year, demonstrating how quickly domestic companies can ramp up their capabilities in the sphere. Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said he was drawn in particular to Sakana's endeavors in Japan to popularize AI. His company, which makes the accelerator chips that drive the global development of generative AI, has since 2023 stepped up its pace of startup investment. "Countries are embracing sovereign AI to capture and codify their data, culture and language through their own unique large language models," Huang said in a statement. "The team at Sakana AI is helping spur the democratization of AI in Japan." The Asian nation is beginning to draw global attention as an AI market. Microsoft Corp. is investing $2.9 billion over two years to build out the country's data centers and cloud computing infrastructure, while OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman just opened a Tokyo office. Microsoft is also partnering with SoftBank Corp. on generative AI, while OpenAI is working with Rakuten Group Inc. Previously valued at around $200 million, Sakana's approach contrasts with those of industry leader OpenAI and others spending billions of dollars training AI on huge datasets. Sakana says its algorithms can help automate the creation of AI models that process language or images by mimicking natural selection when they combine, test and discard data, reducing the amount of human input required.

Sakana AI Raises $100M in Series A, Partners with NVIDIA to Boost Japan's AI Research

The collaboration with NVIDIA will support Sakana AI's access to data centers in Japan, enhancing their capability to conduct experiments and drive AI innovations locally. Tokyo-based AI research and development firm Sakana AI has successfully raised over $100 million in its Series A funding round. Leading the round are New Enterprise Associates, Khosla Ventures, and Lux Capital, with NVIDIA also participating. Moreover, the company is also set to collaborate with NVIDIA on research, infrastructure, and AI community development in Japan. Sakana AI, which focuses on nature-inspired intelligence and foundation models, aims to advance AI research with an emphasis on evolutionary optimisation and sparsity. The partnership with NVIDIA will provide Sakana AI with access to cutting-edge GPU technologies, essential for their development goals. Additionally, the collaboration will support Sakana AI's access to data centers in Japan, enhancing their capability to conduct experiments and drive AI innovations locally. "Countries are embracing Sovereign AI to capture and codify their data, culture and language through their own unique large language models. 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," said Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA. The company's partnership with NVIDIA is designed around three main areas: advancing research, leveraging NVIDIA's data center infrastructure, and boosting Japan's AI community.Sakana AI plans to address Japan's AI talent gap through increased community activities, including events and university outreach. "While many labs globally are trying to catch up, and train foundation models by using the same techniques as everyone else, Japan's Sakana AI is showing the path to innovation. We have been early investors and are thrilled to have NVIDIA join us on this journey", said Vinod Khosla, Founder of Khosla Ventures. Looking ahead, Sakana AI aims to tackle Japan's significant challenges, such as demographic decline and geopolitical tensions, by building a world-class AI lab. The company's goal is to develop technologies that support Japan's future competitiveness and address the nation's pressing issues. With the Series A funding, Sakana AI will invest in talent and infrastructure to advance their mission of creating sustainable and efficient AI technologies. The company aspires to enhance Japan's technological position and support its institutions and citizens in navigating future challenges.

'AI Scientist' maker Sakana AI gets funding from Nvidia

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." AI search startup Perplexity AI valued at more than $1 billion after new funding round 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. Read Comments

Nvidia-Backed Sakana AI to Build 'World-Class AI Lab' in Japan | PYMNTS.com

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.

Sakana AI scores $100M to challenge OpenAI, Anthropic as 'world class' AI lab

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More 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."