Japanese AI unicorn Sakana AI has announced that it is developing its first mobile app, "Sakana AI App" (working title), and is recruiting beta users. CEO David Ha calls it a "brand-new direction" for the company. This yet-to-be-named app has been placed in a strategic position, and that is inseparable from its origins—it is based in Tokyo and was co-founded by former Google scientist David Ha, former Stability AI executive Ren Ito, and Llion Jones, a co-author of the famous Transformer paper "Attention Is All You Need," bringing academic prestige into a startup.
Putting "Natural Selection" into a Phone Its signature approach is called "evolutionary model merging," an idea borrowed from natural selection in the biological world: letting models compete, be selected, and merge with one another like species to process language and image data, thereby lowering compute costs and boosting performance. This nature-inspired route used to remain mostly in papers and the cloud; now that it is being put onto phone screens, it means the company wants to reach users directly, rather than only being an underlying technology supplier. From "selling to enterprises" to "putting it in your pocket," this is no small leap.
What has drawn even more attention from the outside world is its speed of growth. Less than a year after its founding, Sakana AI became Japan's fastest-growing AI unicorn, and in 2024 its valuation surpassed US$1 billion, about RMB 6.68 billion at current exchange rates. As one of the few AI stars native to Japan, it secured its ticket early with a differentiated route, and its moves are all benchmarked against giants on the other side of the ocean. Now, its first app is recruiting beta testers, which amounts to bringing the laboratory concept of "evolution" in front of consumers for the first time—it is still too early to judge success or failure, but this dark horse is no longer content to stay only in papers.
