Ex-Anthropic startup Mirendil in talks to raise up to $1B at $5B valuation, three months after launch
快鲤鱼 · wechat · 2026-09-28
Mirendil, founded months ago by two ex-Anthropic researchers, is in talks to raise up to $1B led by Kleiner Perkins with a16z participating, at a potential $5B valuation — up from $1B three months ago.
Company: 20 people, no product yet. CEO Behnam Neyshabur worked on Anthropic's Discovery team and AI Scientist; CTO Harsh Mehta built internal AI R&D automation there. Team also draws from Google DeepMind, xAI, and OpenAI.
Thesis: Recursive Self-Improvement — AI handling data prep, experiment design, coding, training, and evaluation in a closed loop. Mirendil aims to productize the "AI building AI" capability that frontier labs validated internally but won't sell externally, targeting pharma, biology, and materials labs. It raised a $200M seed in June (with NVIDIA) and signed a >$100M Google Cloud compute deal; first frontier model planned for early 2027.
Crowding field: Recursive Superintelligence ($650M raised, $4.65B valuation), Ricursive Intelligence ($300M A, AI-designed chips), INT21 (AI-generated GPU kernels), plus Chinese startups Chaoyeng and Yuanhuan — all racing to scale the AI-research loop.
Related event: Ex-Anthropic Founders' Startup Mirendil in Talks to Raise Up to $1 Billion(3 posts)→
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