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Tokyo's frontier AI research lab — nature-inspired foundation models for Japan and the world
HQ: Tokyo, Japan | Founded: 2023 | Employees: ~50 (2026) | Stage: Late Stage VC (Series B) | Website: https://sakana.ai
Sakana AI is a frontier AI research and development company founded in Tokyo in July 2023 by David Ha (CEO, former Google Brain research scientist and head of research at Stability AI), Llion Jones (CTO, co-author of the landmark Transformer paper 'Attention Is All You Need' and former Google Brain engineer), and Ren Ito (COO/Chairman). The company's thesis, articulated at founding, is to build AI inspired by nature — using evolutionary algorithms, self-organization, and swarm intelligence rather than only scaling up monolithic models.
That approach has produced a distinctive research portfolio: evolutionary model merging that creates new models by combining existing ones (including some of the first 'Tokyo 7B' and Japanese-language foundation models), the viral 'The AI Scientist' — a ful
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