Mirendil, founded by two researchers who left Anthropic after barely a year, has raised $200m at a $1bn valuation. The pitch: sell the self-improving AI that the big labs build for themselves and guard from everyone else.
The biggest AI labs share one private conviction. The fastest way to build better AI is to point AI at the problem of building AI. They run that loop in-house, and their terms of service stop outsiders from doing the same. Two of their former researchers have now raised $200m to break the lock.
The startup is called Mirendil, and it announced its seed round on 24 June. The figure is striking for a company with no product: $200m at a $1bn valuation, one of the largest seed rounds the sector has seen. Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins co-led it, with Nvidia joining in.
Its founders are Behnam Neyshabur and Harsh Mehta. The pair met at Google in 2019, moved to Anthropic in late 2024, then left in December 2025, soon after the launch of Claude Opus 4.5. Neyshabur, now chief executive, had spent more than five years at Alphabet co-leading reasoning research for Gemini.
Selling the engine the labs keep for themselves
