Sakana AI Gets Investments from 10 Major Japan Firms

Tokyo, Sept. 18 (Jiji Press)--Sakana AI K.K., a Tokyo-based artificial intelligence development startup founded mainly by former Google researchers, has said that it received investments from 10 major Japanese companies.

Sakana AI aims to accelerate business development in Japan through cooperation with the investors, according to an announcement Tuesday.

The total amount of recently announced investments, including that from U.S. semiconductor giant Nvidia Corp. disclosed earlier this month, thus reached about 30 billion yen.

The 10 new investors include six financial companies--Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp., Mizuho Financial Group Inc., Nomura Holdings Inc., SBI Holdings Inc. and Dai-ichi Life Insurance Co. The remaining four are NEC Corp., Fujitsu Ltd., Itochu Corp. and KDDI Corp.

Sakana AI was founded in summer last year. It aims to create generative AI that combines multiple small-scale language models instead of using a single large-scale model. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. announced its investment in the startup in January this year.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]