Sakana AI raised $100+M in Series A funding and scored a partnership with NVIDIA

Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based AI R&D company that recently made the news with the launch of its AI Scientist, just announced it has secured over $100 million in funding after closing a Series A led by New Enterprise Associates and returning investors Khosla Ventures and Lux Capital, with participation from tech giant NVIDIA. In addition, Sakana AI shared it will collaborate with NVIDIA to support the Japanese AI community and build a world-class AI lab.

Sakana AI emerged from stealth with $30 million in seed funding from Khosla Ventures and Lux Capital with an ambitious mission: to develop frontier AI inspired by concepts found in nature, such as evolution and collective intelligence. Sakana means 'fish' in Japanese, and the choice symbolizes the company's approach, where smaller elements, the individual fish, organize into a coherent entity, a school, by following simple rules.

In its short lifespan, Sakana AI has already explored topics such as using LLMs to come up with better algorithms to train LLMs and creating text-to-image generation models to generate and colorize images in the ukiyo-e style, one of the most representative styles in Japanese visual art. The strategic partnership with NVIDIA will unlock even more possibilities for Sakana AI both in developing AI technology and solutions that are culturally relevant to the needs of Japan and in supporting the Japanese AI community by leveraging its early access to NVIDIA-powered data centers and raising the profile of Japan’s AI community by hosting events, hackathons, and university outreach.