Sakana AI
Sakana AI is a World Models & Specialty company founded in 2023 and based in Tokyo, Japan. It is valued at $2.6B.
Sakana AI is a Tokyo-based AI research and development company building nature-inspired foundation models, drawing on ideas from evolutionary algorithms and collective intelligence rather than purely scaling large monolithic models. It was co-founded in 2023 by David Ha (CEO), Llion Jones (CTO), and Ren Ito (COO), all former Google researchers; Jones is a co-author of the 'Attention Is All You Need' transformer paper. The company raised about $30 million in seed funding from Lux Capital and Khosla Ventures, roughly $200 million in a Series A in September 2024 (led by NEA, Khosla Ventures, and Lux Capital, with Japanese institutions and Nvidia participating) that made it Japan's first AI unicorn, and a $135 million Series B in November 2025 at a $2.65 billion valuation led by Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.
Sakana AI is Japan's most valuable AI startup, reaching a $2.65B valuation while pursuing an evolutionary, efficiency-first alternative to brute-force model scaling.
sakana.ai ↗·World Models & Specialty·
Japan·private 
