AI Tool Set, June 15 news: According to Nikkei, the Japanese artificial intelligence startup co-founded by former Google researchersSakana AI, plans to conduct a funding round this month, and its valuation will exceed $1 billion, making it the fastest Japanese company to join the unicorn ranks.
Benefiting from the booming development of generative artificial intelligence, the startup is in negotiations with U.S. venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates, Khosla Ventures, and Lux Capital, and plans to raise $125 million in new funding at a valuation of more than $1.1 billion.
Sakana AI was founded in July 2023 by David Ha, Llion Jones, and Ren Ito. David Ha and Llion Jones previously worked on AI research at Google, and Llion Jones is one of the authors of the paper "Attention Is All You Need." Ren Ito was formerly an official at Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a former executive at the e-commerce platform Mercari.
In January of this year, the company raised $30 million from Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, and other investors including NTT Group, KDDI, and Sony Group. The proceeds from the new funding round will be used to accelerate generative AI research.
Compared with OpenAI and Google, which invest huge amounts of money to create and improve large-scale artificial intelligence systems, Sakana AI has adopted a different strategy, drawing inspiration from biological evolution and imitating biological evolutionary systems. In March, the company said it had developed an evolutionary model technology that can merge multiple small AI models to efficiently create more complex systems. This approach has attracted the interest of global investors because of its relatively low cost and energy requirements.
Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, the generative AI field has grown rapidly, and venture capital is converging on participants in this field. According to CB Insights data, OpenAI's valuation reached $80 billion in February. This year, 6 of the world's top 10 generative AI unicorns have conducted funding. Just this month, France'sMistral AIand Canada's Cohere saw their valuations increase threefold and more than twofold, respectively.
(Source:Nikkei）