NEC Invests in Sakana AI to Drive Development of Gen-AI

NEC Orchestrating Future Fund (NOFF), an ecosystem-based corporate venture capital (CVC) fund, has made an investment in Sakana AI, a Japan-based company that gathers technical talent from around the world to conduct research and development of generative AI.

While the use of AI is essential to improve the competitiveness of companies, the development of large-scale AI models requires an enormous amount of time and cost to learn data.

Sakana AI was founded in Tokyo in 2023 by David Ha, who has led research on complex and autonomous systems at Google Brain's Japan division, Llion Jones, one of the authors of the paper "Attention Is All You Need," which helped to trigger the current boom in generative AI, and Ren Ito, who took the lead on the global expansion of Mercari, Japan's first unicorn start-up. The company creates innovative AI development methods by combining multiple different AI models, resulting in the low cost creation of large-scale models that feature new functions.

NEC aims to be a social value creator that solves various social issues through cutting-edge technologies. AI is a key technology for achieving these goals, which makes it essential to ensure that AI models are developed efficiently and safely for a wide range of industries.

Sakana AI's technology has the potential to quickly lead to solutions to unique and complex challenges in a variety of fields, including space and government. Therefore, with this investment, NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) has initiated discussions with Sakana AI for business collaboration using generative AI.

"The NEC Orchestrating Future Fund invests in startups that are pioneering new markets with cutting-edge technologies and innovative business models," said Motoo Nishihara, Corporate Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of NEC Corporation. "Sakana AI is a company that can greatly expand the potential of AI applications, which is in line with NEC's vision of AI that is smoothly integrated throughout society. Together with Sakana AI, we will accelerate our efforts to create new social value."

"We will accelerate both our R&D and business development collaboration in partnership with NEC," said David Ha, Co-Founder and CEO of Sakana AI. "Through our partnership with NEC, we will do our utmost to provide solutions to the challenges that Japanese industries and society face."