Sakana AI Receives Investment from Salesforce Ventures

- The company was co-founded by prominent AI researchers David Ha, formerly of Google Brain and Stability AI, and Llion Jones, one of the eight authors of the influential 2017 Google paper "Attention Is All You Need" which introduced the transformer architecture. - Sakana AI, which means "fish" in Japanese, focuses on creating new AI models through "nature-inspired" methods like collective and evolutionary intelligence, rather than building massive, energy-intensive models from scratch. One of their key techniques is "Evolutionary Model Merge," which combines traits from multiple existing open-source AI models to create new, specialized ones. - This investment is part of Salesforce Ventures' $1 billion AI fund, which has backed over 35 AI companies, including major players like Anthropic and Cohere. The fund focuses on enterprise AI, aligning with Sakana AI's stated goal of targeting the finance and defense sectors. - The Tokyo-based startup reached unicorn status with a valuation over $1 billion, reportedly the fastest for a Japanese company. Its January 2024 seed round of $30 million was led by Lux Capital and Khosla Ventures, with angel investment from AI leaders like Google's Jeff Dean and ScaleAI's Alexandr Wang. - In addition to venture capital, Sakana AI has secured strategic partnerships with major Japanese corporations, including a research and development collaboration with NTT Group and a multi-year deal with megabank MUFG to build bank-specific AI systems.