Tokyo-based frontier AI research company developing nature-inspired AI, evolutionary optimization and autonomous research systems, including The AI Scientist, published in Nature.
Sakana AI is a frontier artificial intelligence research company based in Tokyo, founded in 2023 by three former Google researchers: David Ha (CEO), Ren Ito (Chairman) and Llion Jones (CTO), an author of the seminal Transformer paper. The firm pursues nature-inspired approaches to AI development - evolutionary optimization, collective intelligence and recursive self-improvement systems - and has become Japan's leading AI research laboratory and its fastest-growing AI unicorn. Its name means fish in Japanese; the logo, drawn from schools of fish moving as one, is a statement of intent: intelligence that emerges through self-organization rather than top-down design.
The laboratory's research output has been striking by any standard. The AI Scientist, described as the world's first AI system capable of autonomously conducting scientific research, was published in Nature. Around it sits a growing portfolio of applied systems: Sakana Fugu, which orchestrates frontier large language models; Sakana Namazu, a large language model specialised in the Japanese language; and Sakana Marlin, an autonomous research agent built for strategic analysis. The technical work spans large language models, LLM orchestration and autonomous research agents - each rooted in a research ethos centred on evolution and self-organization.
The company closed a $135M Series B in November 2025 at a $2.65B valuation, backed by NVIDIA and Google alongside leading Japanese corporations. Institutional collaborations extend across MUFG Bank, SMBC Group and Daiwa Securities Group, as well as Japan's Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, reflecting genuine standing in financial services, government and defence as well as research.
