About Sakana AI
Sakana AI is a Tokyo research company that builds AI foundation models using ideas borrowed from nature, such as evolution and collective behavior. One of its techniques, evolutionary model merging, combines parts of existing models to produce new ones at low cost, rather than training each from scratch. It does not make chips, so it sits in this directory as a user of AI compute. Sakana AI was founded in 2023 by David Ha and Llion Jones, and its name means fish in Japanese.
Sakana AI was founded in 2023 and is based in Tokyo, Japan. It is listed under AI Accelerators. Reported funding is $135M Series B (Nov 2025) at $2.65B valuation.
Compute Technologies
- AI Accelerators
What Sakana AI works on
AI Accelerators
An AI accelerator is a chip, or a part of a chip, designed to run machine learning faster or with less energy than a general-purpose processor. The category includes GPUs, TPUs, neural processing units (NPUs) and chips from many startups.
Also in Japan
Socionext, Preferred Networks, EdgeCortix, Renesas Electronics, LeapMind
