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Sakana AI is using $100 million raised from a series A funding round to open an AI lab in Japan, backed by Nvidia.
In its blog post published on September 4, the company said Lux Capital, Khosla Ventures, and New Enterprise Association led the funding round, with Nvidia’s support.
The AI startup will also collaborate with Nvidia across several key areas, focusing on research, infrastructure, and AI community building in Japan. The aim is to give the country a competitive edge in the market.
Together, Sakana AI and Nvidia hope to devise new technologies. The startup will gain early access to Nvidia-supported data centers to help with experiments during initial testing phases.
Access to Nvidia’s GPU technologies will help the company scale evolutionary optimization methods or utilize sparsity.
The two brands will also collaborate to develop Japan’s AI community through hackathons, events, and university outreach.
In its blog post, Sakana said it would continue investing in talent and developing its infrastructure to advance “nature-inspired, sustainable, and energy-efficient AI technologies.”
Sakana AI Founded by Former Google Researchers
Sakana stealth launched in August last year, and its name means “fish” in Japanese. The company aims to train low-cost generative AI models with small datasets. According to Bloomberg, it has already introduced several AI models for Japanese speakers.
The AI startup is co-founded by David Ha, former head of Google’s Japanese AI research unit, and Llion Jones, a Google researcher and one of eight co-authors of “Attention is All You Need,” a revolutionary paper published in 2017 on machine learning transformers that underpins current generative AI models like ChatGPT.
As Japan faces numerous challenges,, including decreased competitiveness and a declining population, global investors are beginning to pay attention to it as its AI market expands.
Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, opened an office in Tokyo in April, and Microsoft Corps will invest $2.9 billion over two years to expand the country’s data centers and cloud computing infrastructure.
