Latest Sakana AI News & Updates

See the latest news and media coverage for Sakana AI. We track all announcements, press releases, and industry mentions in real time, all in one place.

Sakana AI

Frontier AI research and enterprise solutions company

sakana.ai

Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan
Founded year: 2023
Company type: Private company
Number of employees: 280–500
Industry: IT Services & Consulting

Last updated November 2

Latest news about Sakana AI

In short: Sakana AI began pretraining Sawara from scratch, with its first Small model planned for spring 2027.

Company announcements

November 2 Sakana AI

Sakana AI begins pre-training its own language model, Sakana Sawara

Announced at the symposium, the initial Sawara Small is scheduled for release in spring 2027. Designed from scratch for agent use cases.

January 23 Sakana AI

Sakana AI announces strategic partnership with Google

Including funding, jointly promote product quality improvement and highly reliable AI implementation in core industries.

November 17, 2025 Sakana AI

Sakana AI raised 32 billion yen in Series B funding

The investment will accelerate sustainable AI development and societal implementation in Japan.

May 19, 2025 Sakana AI

Sakana AI announces multiyear partnership with MUFG Bank

Sakana AI will develop bank-specific AI systems and COO Ren Ito will serve as an advisor to MUFG Bank.

Media coverage

October 26 Nikkei

Sakana AI to develop domestic AI, utilizing for defense and cyber to eliminate reliance risks on the US and China

Generative AI model "Sakana Sawara" announced by Sakana AI (26th, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo) New AI development startup Sakana AI (Minato, Tokyo) announced on the 26th that it will begin developing its own generative AI model. The company plans to launch its first domestically produced AI model in spring 2027, targeting applications in defense and cyber ...

October 21 Crypto Briefing

Sakana AI will build domestic AI models from scratch in Japan

Sakana AI will build domestic AI models from scratch in Japan, a shift from its model-merging approach as the country pushes for sovereign AI.

September 24 Nikkei

"Father of Modern AI" Jürgen Schmidhuber Joins Sakana AI

Sakana AI, an artificial intelligence (AI) development company based in Minato, Tokyo, has announced the participation of renowned researcher Jürgen Schmidhuber, known as the "Father of Modern AI." Schmidhuber will lead a research team aiming to improve the AI development process using AI itself. He will serve as Chief Scientific Advisor at Sakana AI while concurrently holding his current position at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA and other institutions. Particularly, Sakana...

September 11 Nikkei

Sakana AI's "Sakana Fugu", AI performance once again at the world's highest level, multiple models linked

AI development startup Sakana AI (Sakana AI, Minato, Tokyo) has announced the latest version of its core model, "Sakana Fugu". By combining multiple AIs, it has achieved top-tier performance. This sets a precedent for Japanese companies keeping pace with the global AI development race. The high-performance model "Fugu Ultra" released an updated version, "Fugu Ultra v2", on the 11th. It can write code and...

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