Mirendil raises $200M seed at ~$1B valuation to automate AI research
The AMW Read
Third pre-product frontier lab (after Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machines Lab) to raise near-$1B seed capital on researcher pedigree alone, with named talent moving from Anthropic/OpenAI/DeepMind/xAI and Nvidia backing to secure compute demand.
Mirendil raises $200M seed at ~$1B valuation to automate AI research
Mirendil, a new AI research lab founded by researchers from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and xAI, has raised $200 million in seed funding at approximately $1 billion valuation.
The round, one of the largest seed rounds in AI history, was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, with Nvidia and other undisclosed investors also participating. CEO and co-founder Behnam Neyshabur previously worked as a researcher at Anthropic, alongside co-founders Harsh Mehta, Shayan Salehian, and Tara Rezaei; the roughly 20-person team also includes engineers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and xAI. Mirendil has not disclosed revenue, launched a commercial product, or published benchmarks, saying it is focused on pre-commercial research to automate the AI research and development process itself.
The deal extends a pattern of investors pricing pre-revenue frontier-research teams like late-stage growth companies, weighting talent and compute access over commercial traction. Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence raised roughly $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation in 2024, and Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab secured $2 billion in commitments despite limited public product detail. Mirendil's roughly 20% dilution at seed suggests founders retained unusually strong leverage, available mainly to teams with proven frontier-lab pedigrees. Nvidia's participation fits its practice of backing compute-intensive labs to secure downstream GPU demand.
For investors, the round shows capital now being committed against research-automation ambition well ahead of product, revenue, or benchmark evidence, raising the risk that valuation outruns verifiable progress. For builders competing for frontier-research talent, Nvidia's presence as a strategic investor reinforces that a hardware-partner relationship, not funding alone, is becoming a competitive prerequisite at this tier.