companies

Sakana AI

Tokyo lab founded by ex-Google researchers building nature-inspired AI — evolutionary model merging, automated research agents, and enterprise products.

Sakana AI was founded in Tokyo in 2023 by David Ha and Llion Jones, both former Google Brain and Google researchers — Jones co-authored the original 'Attention Is All You Need' Transformer paper — alongside Ren Ito. The company's research identity centers on nature-inspired methods: evolutionary model merging, which combines existing open models into new ones without additional training, and multi-agent systems that borrow ideas from swarm and collective intelligence rather than simply scaling a single model. Sakana raised a seed round from Lux Capital and Khosla Ventures, followed by a roughly $200 million Series A in 2024 backed by Mitsubishi UFJ, SMBC, Mizuho, KDDI and Nvidia, and a $135 million Series B in November 2025 that valued the company at approximately $2.65 billion — among Japan's most valuable AI startups. Beyond research papers like 'The AI Scientist,' which demonstrated a fully automated research pipeline, Sakana has shipped commercial products including Sakana Chat, the Marlin autonomous research agent, and the Fugu multi-agent orchestration system, explicitly framed as a way for Japanese and allied enterprises to reduce dependence on US frontier labs.

Founded

2023

Headquarters

Tokyo, Japan

Sector

lab