Nvidia-backed Japanese AI startup Sakana valued at $1.5B after over $200M funding round

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA)-backed Sakana AI said it raised about 30B yen (about $214M) in a Series A funding round.

The Tokyo-based AI startup said it received new investment from Japanese companies Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and Mizuho Financial Group, as well as NEC, SBI Group, Dai-ichi Life Insurance, Itochu Group, KDDI, Fujitsu, and Nomura Holdings.

Sakana had also received investment from New Enterprise Associates, or NEA, Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, Translink Capital, 500 Global, and Nvidia (NVDA).

Earlier this month, Sakana said it was raising over $100M in the funding round.

The company noted that it continued to receive investment from Japanese venture capitalists led by Global Brain, JAFCO, and Miyako Capital.

Sakana said this brings the total amount of Series A funding to about 30B yen to help accelerate business expansion in the Japanese market.

The funding valued the company at about $1.5B just over a year after its launch, Bloomberg News reported.

In March, Sakana developed a way to automate the integration of multiple foundational models, including large language models, or LLMs, and in June, they discovered a way to use LLMs to train LLMs more efficiently. Last month, they realized a technology that uses LLMs to “automate the research and development process itself,” which it named “AI Scientist,” according to Sakana.

Sakana’s Co-Founder and CEO David Ha had helped establish the Google Brain research team in Tokyo, while the other Co-Founder Llion Jones was one of the authors of a key paper which introduced the current AI wave.