Sakana AI
Nature-inspired, efficient and sovereign AI for Japan. The approach is small data-efficient models, evolutionary model merging, and now orchestration of many frontier models instead of training one (Fugu).
- Founded
- 2023
- Headquarters
- Tokyo, Japan
- Founders
- David Ha, Llion Jones, Ren Ito
- Pushes against
- Training ever bigger monolithic frontier models.
- Now
- Google invested (2026-01, Bloomberg headline) and Citi invested (2026-02, headline). Targeting finance, defense, manufacturing and government in Japan. Benchmark claims for Fugu are company-reported.
Key people
- David Ha (CEO)
- Llion Jones (co-author of the Transformer paper)
- Ren Ito
Funding
- 17 November 2025
- Amount
- JPY 20B (~$135M) Series B
- Valuation
- $2.65B post-money
- Lead
- MUFG, Khosla, Macquarie, NEA, Lux, In-Q-Tel (mix of new and returning)
Every funding round in the atlas
What it has shipped
No launch from this lab is in the atlas yet. These come from its profile.
People moves
Of the moves the atlas tracks, 2 joined and 0 left.
- Transformer paper authors (Vaswani, Shazeer, Parmar, Uszkoreit, Jones, Gomez, Kaiser, Polosukhin) 20 March 2024
Google to Adept/Essential AI, Character.AI, Inceptive, Sakana AI, Cohere, OpenAI, Near
Authors of 'Attention Is All You Need' (Google, 2017) - Llion Jones July 2023
Google to Sakana AI
Transformer co-author; ex-Google
Sources
- techcrunch.com/2025/11/17/sakana-ai-raises-135m-series-b-at-a-2-65b-valuation-to-continue-
- startupfortune.com/sakana-ai-launches-fugu-ultra-and-its-orchestration-model-matches-fable
- gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20260125-sakana-ai-google
- citigroup.com/global/news/press-release/2026/citi-makes-strategic-investment-in-sakana-ai-
This profile was checked against its sources on 6 October 2026. How we check