Anthropic Alumni Startup Mirendil Raises $200M Seed Round at $1B Valuation

Mirendil, an AI startup founded by two former Anthropic employees, announced a $200 million seed funding round at a $1 billion valuation, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and NVIDIA. The company aims to accelerate scientific research through recursive self-improvement technology, enabling scientists to autonomously train and iterate on proprietary AI models.

Background and Team

Mirendil was co-founded by Behnam Neyshabur (CEO) and Harsh Mehta (CTO), who worked together for seven years at institutions including Anthropic and Google DeepMind. The team also includes former xAI engineer Shayan Salehian and MIT graduate Tara Rezaei Kheirkhah, totaling about 20 people. The company name is derived from Elvish in The Lord of the Rings, meaning "friend of treasures."

Technical Approach and Vision

Mirendil's core technical path is recursive self-improvement, where AI systems help build stronger successor systems. CEO Neyshabur states this is the shortest path to accelerating scientific research and believes safety issues can be addressed under human supervision. The company plans to develop novel variants of transformer attention mechanisms and train self-improving AIs using reinforcement learning sandboxes. Its goal is to build a tool platform enabling research teams in fields like medicine and materials science to train proprietary AI models independently, rather than relying on big tech's general-purpose models.

Funding and Market Logic

This round is one of the largest seed rounds in AI in recent years. a16z investors note that leading AI labs (e.g., Anthropic) restrict external developers from using their models to train competitors, and infrastructure is highly centralized, creating a structural gap. Mirendil's positioning fills this gap, making cutting-edge AI R&D capabilities accessible beyond a few labs. Kleiner Perkins investors reveal the team has made significant progress with its proprietary system in just a few months.

Future Plans

Mirendil plans to release its first model and product in the coming months to gather early user feedback. CEO Neyshabur's vision: "We hope that in the future, there will be thousands of labs, each tackling the most important problems, and we want to be the force that empowers them."