Ex-Anthropic founders' Mirendil eyes $5B valuation months after $1B seed
What's the deal? Mirendil, a startup founded by former Anthropic staff, is in talks to raise a new round of up to $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation, according to people familiar with the discussions cited by Bloomberg. Kleiner Perkins is in talks to lead the round, with Andreessen Horowitz — which co-led Mirendil's seed alongside Kleiner Perkins — also in talks to invest again. Neither firm has commented publicly.
The discussions come just three months after the company closed a $200 million seed round at a roughly $1 billion valuation — a fivefold jump in the proposed valuation in that time.
Why it matters: The biggest labs already use AI to speed up their own research — Anthropic has said Claude now writes the majority of the code merged into its own codebase — but they don't sell that capability to outsiders. Mirendil wants to be the company that does, part of a wider wave of so-called “neolabs” betting that automating AI research itself is the industry's highest-leverage opportunity. Announcing the seed round in June, CEO Behnam Neyshabur put it in one line: “the most important application of AI is AI itself.”
The founders: Neyshabur and CTO Harsh Mehta met at Google in 2019, after Mehta cold-emailed him. Neyshabur went on to co-lead Google DeepMind's Blueshift team, working on reasoning and math for Gemini, while Mehta built the first version of Anthropic's internal AI-research platform. The two joined Anthropic in late 2024 and left together in December 2025, taking with them Shayan Salehian, an early xAI engineer, and Tara Rezaei Kheirkhah, a 23-year-old MIT graduate. Founded that same month, Mirendil trains models specifically good at doing AI research, then wraps them in a system that plans experiments, runs them, and iterates with progressively less human input.
The wider field: Mirendil joins a crowded and increasingly expensive category. Safe Superintelligence, led by Ilya Sutskever, has raised roughly $3 billion in disclosed equity at a $32 billion valuation, plus a separate $5 billion Nvidia compute deal — with no product to show for it. Recursive Superintelligence raised $650 million at a $4.65 billion valuation. Thinking Machines Lab, Mira Murati's company, raised $2 billion at $12 billion, watched a $50 billion round collapse, and is now reportedly back in talks near $40 billion — but has at least shipped products, Tinker and Inkling. Periodic Labs, also backed by Andreessen Horowitz, raised $300 million at $1.3 billion to focus narrowly on materials science, and was reportedly in talks for around $7 billion as of March.
The signal: A fivefold valuation jump in a matter of months underscores how much capital is chasing teams with Anthropic pedigree. The open question hanging over the whole category, not just Mirendil, is how much of it is priced on research pedigree versus an actual product roadmap nobody outside these labs has seen.
Read more: Bloomberg | Tech Funding News
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
