Google has taken a stake in Japanese AI startup Sakana AI, announced the companies on Friday. The investment, which follows Sakana's $135 million Series B that valued the company at $2.65 billion in November, gives Google a strategic partner to push its Gemini chatbot into Japan's corporate sector. Neither side disclosed the investment amount.
The Gemini problem in Japan
Google's Gemini has been gaining ground globally against ChatGPT. According to Similarweb data from January 2026, Gemini's market share has grown from 5.4% to around 18-21%, while ChatGPT has dropped from 87% to roughly 65%. But market share is one thing; enterprise contracts in Japan's notoriously conservative corporate landscape are another.
Through the deal, the US company gains the help of one of Japan's most valuable startups to promote Gemini in a cash-rich corporate landscape where it trails OpenAI's ChatGPT. Japanese companies tend to move slowly on adopting new technology. Sakana has already done the hard work of building trust with major financial institutions including Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and Mizuho Financial Group. Google gets a local partner with doors already open.
The arrangement isn't just distribution. According to Sakana's announcement, the startup will use Gemini and Gemma models in its own R&D, while providing Google with feedback on what Japanese enterprise customers actually need. Think of it as Google outsourcing its Japan localization to a team that already speaks the language, literally and commercially.
Who's behind Sakana
The startup was founded in 2023 by David Ha and Llion Jones, both ex-Google researchers with unusual pedigrees. Ha led Google Brain's research team in Tokyo after a career as a derivatives trader at Goldman Sachs. Jones is a co-author of the 2017 paper "Attention Is All You Need", which introduced the transformer architecture now powering essentially every major language model.
The company was founded by David Ha, Llion Jones and Ren Ito. Llion Jones co-authored the famous paper "Attention Is All You Need" when he was working for Google in 2017.
Sakana's approach differs from the brute-force compute race. Rather than building ever-larger models, the company focuses on combining and optimizing existing ones. Their evolutionary model merging technique uses algorithms inspired by natural selection to combine multiple AI models into specialized variants, which requires far less computational resources than training from scratch.
What Sakana brings
The startup has been busy. Their "AI Scientist" project attempts to automate scientific research, and a paper produced by the system passed peer review at a workshop in a top AI conference. More practically, their ALE-Agent recently won an AtCoder Heuristic Contest, a competitive programming competition, placing first among 804 human participants.
The collaboration centers on combining Google's advanced AI infrastructure and models with Sakana AI's research capabilities and proprietary tools such as "AI Scientist" and "ALE Agent."
Whether these research projects translate into enterprise revenue is the question. Ha has outlined plans to expand beyond finance into Japan's defense sector and other government work. That ambition may explain why a startup valued at $2.65 billion needs yet another investor: compute-intensive government contracts and international expansion require cash.
The NVIDIA connection
Google isn't Sakana's only big-tech backer. NVIDIA participated in the company's Series A round in 2024, one of its larger investments in Japan's AI sector. We are also excited to announce a new collaboration with NVIDIA around research, infrastructure and AI community building in Japan!
The chip maker's involvement goes beyond capital. Sakana gets access to NVIDIA's GPU technologies and data center infrastructure, critical for a company trying to compete in AI without spending billions on training runs. Jensen Huang praised the partnership at the time, noting Sakana's focus on building AI models tailored to Japanese language and culture.
What this means
For Google, the investment is a relatively cheap way to accelerate Gemini's adoption in a wealthy market where it's been losing to ChatGPT. For Sakana, it's validation from the company whose researchers founded it, plus access to models and infrastructure that would otherwise cost far more to replicate.
The deal also reflects a broader trend of sovereign AI development. Japan, like many countries, wants domestic AI capabilities rather than pure dependence on American providers. Sakana is positioning itself as that option, even while using American models and American investment to get there. That tension between national ambition and practical necessity isn't going away.
Sakana did not disclose how much Google invested or what ownership stake the company received.
