Tokyo-based start-up Sakana AI has announced its Series A funding round of around $137 million. Chipmaker Nvidia has emerged as the biggest investor in the start-up, 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 start-up 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.”
In August, the start-up 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 start-up was founded in July 2023 by ex-Googlers David Ha and Llion Jones, and Ren Ito, who was previously at AI image generating start-up 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 start-up then became the fastest company founded from scratch in Japan to touch unicorn status.
