A new AI lab founded by veterans of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and xAI has raised $200 million in seed funding at a valuation of roughly $1 billion, marking one of the largest seed rounds in artificial intelligence history. Mirendil, co-founded by former Anthropic researcher Behnam Neyshabur, attracted investments from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Kleiner Perkins as co-leads, with NVIDIA also participating alongside other undisclosed investors.
The $200 million raise implies that incoming investors acquired roughly 20% ownership in the company, reflecting a post-money valuation of $1 billion and highlighting how venture capital is increasingly willing to fund frontier AI research at scales traditionally reserved for later-stage startups. The founding team consists of 20 engineers and researchers, including co-founders Harsh Mehta, Shayan Salehian, and Tara Rezaei. Mirendil’s core mission is to develop AI systems capable of automating the AI research and development process itself—using AI to accelerate the creation of new AI models.
Neyshabur explained the vision in a video shared by a16z: “When you think about what a scientist or an engineer does, the main skill they have is get very deep in a domain and build a very sharp expertise that accumulates over time.” Kleiner Perkins’ Mamoon Hamid likened the company to a frontier laboratory focused exclusively on advancing AI R&D, while a16z’s Matt Bornstein noted the team is working on one of the major hyperscale challenges in AI, though technical specifics remain undisclosed. As of the announcement, Mirendil has not released any revenue figures, commercial products, or technical benchmarks.
NVIDIA’s participation underscores a strategic pattern: by funding compute-intensive AI startups, the chipmaker secures future demand for its GPUs used in model training and inference. Mirendil joins a growing list of ex-frontier lab spinouts receiving massive early-stage capital, including Safe Superintelligence (co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, ~$1 billion raised) and Thinking Machines Lab (led by Mira Murati, $2 billion commitment). The round signals that investors are betting heavily on scientific talent and long-term research potential over near-term commercial traction, reinforcing a broader industry shift toward autonomous AI system development.
