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The story
Sakana AI (Minato, Tokyo), an AI development company, is reportedly moving ahead with preparations for an initial public offering (IPO), aiming to list on the stock market as early as autumn 2027. If realized, it would be Japan’s first-ever listing by a company dedicated solely to generative AI, and reports suggest its market capitalization at the time of its IPO could exceed Mercari’s roughly ¥680 billion, potentially making it one of the largest-ever deals among Japanese startups. Goldman Sachs is said to have been brought on as an advisor for the IPO. On 5ch, discussion centered on the fact that the company’s flagship model is an additionally-trained version built on top of “Kimi K2.6,” an open model released by the Chinese company Moonshot AI — sparking debate over whether it can really be called a “domestically made” AI, and over the lack of disclosed revenue figures.
Sakana AI (Minato, Tokyo), an artificial intelligence (AI) development company, has begun preparations for an initial public offering (IPO). With both the Japanese and U.S. markets in mind, it aims to go public as early as autumn 2027. If things proceed as planned, it would be the first listing by a company dedicated solely to generative AI in Japan. Its market capitalization at the IPO price could exceed Mercari’s roughly ¥680 billion, potentially making it one of the largest deals ever among Japanese startups.
The company recently brought on Goldman Sachs as an advisor for the IPO. As for the listing market, the Tokyo Stock Exchange…
Source: nikkei.com / Original article here
What people said
Anyone who actually understands and uses AI wouldn't give this a second glance
I mean, this company doesn't have the chops to build its own LLM anyway
Borrowing someone else's and mixing it up a bit is about the best they can do
Don't get that point mixed up
Just a re-skinned version of Chinese AI.
Here's what they themselves say:
> Sakana AI's current model, "Sakana Namazu," is based on "Kimi K2.6," an open model released by Moonshot AI, with Sakana AI's own proprietary post-training applied on top.
It's an easy gig: just slap some subsidy-funded extra training onto whatever the latest model happens to be, every time one drops
Lame name.
You don't know? It's a company name that reflects the original concept of using LLMs collectively, like a school of fish — Swimmy-style — rather than as one individual (Swimmy = the classic picture book about little fish banding together).
Once you're trying to go global, the name itself doesn't matter at all.
Thinking it's lame is the lame part.
Besides, with most of the top execs being non-Japanese, a Japanese name is anything but uncool.
You probably don't even know about Anthropic's whole haiku thing, do you? (Anthropic names its models after poetic forms — Haiku, Sonnet, Opus.) It's always the clueless ones who call things lame.
What's actually lame about Sakana isn't the company name — it's the substance of what they're actually doing.
That's exactly it
"Japanese startup" is just a label here
If there's none of the investment and profit reporting normally demanded of American startups, then the IPO comes down to nothing more than the Tokyo Stock Exchange's own say-so
Which then raises the market's own question: so what about the TSE's governance and disclosure standards?
(´・ω・｀) A diplomat!?
The old-school media is hyping this up big time
Especially TV Tokyo and Nikkei
I bet a lot of clueless people are going to get swept up in this
so would I be better off waiting on the Sakana AI IPO lottery
rather than buying Mercari or Kioxia stock (•́ω•̀)?
Well, I don't even know the IPO offering price yet ┓(＾ワ＾)┏
Kazuko Fukuda, former death-row fugitive: "IPOs — Danger! ⚠ Daaanger! (ノ°ο°)ノ"
Feels like it's shaping up to be another IPO cash-grab
Like LINE, Yahoo, or Docomo,
it'll probably just ride a congratulatory pop on day one and peak right there lol
I honestly thought they'd just collect the subsidies and quietly fold, like some kind of vested-interest racket
Background and key points of this topic
Sakana AI was founded in 2023 by David Ha, a former Google researcher, along with Llion Jones (a co-author of the Transformer paper) and Ren Ito, a former diplomat. As pointed out in the thread, its flagship model is additionally trained on top of an open model released by the Chinese company Moonshot AI — a “post-training” approach that’s common among AI companies that don’t build their foundation models entirely from scratch, and isn’t unique to Sakana AI. The report that Goldman Sachs has been brought on as an IPO advisor is, at this stage, still just preparatory-stage information, and neither the listing timing nor the projected market cap is a confirmed figure. That said, it is a fact that these IPO reports are surfacing at a stage when disclosure of revenue and profitability remains thin, and whether its post-listing valuation will truly surpass Mercari’s remains uncertain.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Business News+) thread “[Company] Sakana AI Preps for IPO — One of Japan’s Biggest-Ever Startup Deals, a First for a Dedicated Generative AI Firm.”
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