Former Anthropic Employee Raises $200 Million to Develop AI capable of Building AI

BlockBeats News, June 25th, Mirendil, an artificial intelligence startup founded by former Anthropic researchers Behnam Neyshabur and Harsh Mehta, announced the completion of a $200 million seed round of financing, valuing the company at $1 billion. The funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Nvidia. Mirendil aims to develop autonomously optimizing and iterating recursively self-improving models to assist scientists in developing domain-specific AI models in fields such as medicine or materials science.

The two founders met while working at Google in 2019 and later joined Anthropic together at the end of 2024, resigning after the release of Claude Opus 4.5 in December 2025. In addition to the two founders, Mirendil's founding team includes former xAI early member Shayan Salehian and MIT graduate Tara Rezaei. Currently, Mirendil has an office in downtown San Francisco with approximately 20 technical staff.

Leading-edge large model developers are increasingly relying on AI to accelerate their model development. Data disclosed by Anthropic shows that as of May 2026, Claude has written over 80% of the company's code. However, leading labs typically restrict external developers from using large models for training competitive products in their terms of service and have recently imposed undisclosed response limitations on questions related to AI development.

Unlike concerns from leading labs regarding the security of recursive self-improvement technology, the Mirendil team believes that self-improvement is the fastest path to accelerating scientific research and trusts that self-improvement can be achieved under secure oversight. The company name Mirendil is derived from Elvish in "The Lord of the Rings" and means "friend of discovery." The team plans to release models and products in the coming months to gather user feedback.

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