Ex-Anthropic staffers’ AI startup Mirendil seeks $5B valuation just months after launch

Mirendil, a San Francisco startup founded by former Anthropic researchers, is negotiating a funding round that would value the company at $5 billion. The company is looking to raise up to $1 billion, with Kleiner Perkins reportedly leading the round and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) participating.

To put the speed of this ascent in perspective: Mirendil raised a $200 million seed round at a $1 billion valuation roughly three months ago. A 5x valuation jump in a single quarter is the kind of trajectory that makes even seasoned venture capitalists do a double take.

From Anthropic’s lab to a billion-dollar company

Mirendil was founded in December 2025 by Behnam Neyshabur and Harsh Mehta, both former researchers at Anthropic. Neyshabur previously co-led the scientific AI reasoning team there, while Mehta served as a senior research scientist.

The founding team numbers around 20 specialists drawn from top-tier AI organizations. The company’s earlier seed round, completed in June 2026, was co-led by a16z and Kleiner Perkins, with NVIDIA also chipping in.

What Mirendil is actually building

The startup’s core mission is developing self-improving AI systems designed to automate complex AI research and development tasks. Think of it as building AI that can do the work of AI researchers: designing experiments, iterating on model architectures, and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible without requiring a team of hundreds of PhD holders.

The company frames its mission as democratizing frontier-level AI research capabilities. Today, only a handful of organizations, think OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and Meta, have the resources to conduct cutting-edge AI research.

To support the enormous compute demands of training self-improving models, Mirendil locked down a $100 million Google Cloud deal in August 2026. That partnership provides access to TPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, and managed clusters.

If the $5 billion round closes, Mirendil will have raised approximately $1.2 billion in total funding within roughly nine months of its founding.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.