Mirendil Raises $200M Seed at $1B to Build AI That Builds AI

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Mirendil, a San Francisco, California startup founded by two former Anthropic researchers, has raised $200 million in a Seed round at a $1 billion valuation. It ranks among the largest seed rounds in AI history.

Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins led the round, with Nvidia among the participating investors.

Founders Behnam Neyshabur and Harsh Mehta left Anthropic in December 2025, only months after joining in late 2024. Their goal at Mirendil is to build AI systems that automate AI research itself, putting frontier research and development within reach of universities and research institutions beyond the largest labs. The team has assembled roughly 20 researchers and engineers whose backgrounds span Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and xAI.

The company plans to use the capital to secure high-performance GPU compute clusters, expand its specialized scientific data-ingestion repositories, and recruit elite machine learning researchers and computational scientists.

The size of the round, and the pedigree of the team, underscores how aggressively investors are backing efforts to accelerate AI research using AI itself.