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a16z led MirendilAI's $200M seed round announced 2026-06-24; Kleiner Perkins…

Brief

MirendilAI announced a $200M seed led by a16z (with Kleiner Perkins) on 2026-06-24, with a major NVIDIA investment. Founded by Behnam Neyshabur, Harsh Mehta, Shayan Salehian, and Tara Rezaei, the 20-person team from Anthropic, xAI, DeepMind, and OpenAI is building self-accelerating AI R&D: frontier models that autonomously loop over research and engineering tasks—like a coding agent controlling its own GPUs—to democratize frontier AI work.

Why it matters

a16z led MirendilAI's $200M seed round announced 2026-06-24; Kleiner Perkins co-led the round and NVIDIA made a major follow-on investment.

Key details

  • Mirendil trains frontier models specialized for AI R&D and is building an autonomous system that "loops over research and engineering problems" without human intervention—described as a coding agent that controls its own GPUs.
  • Founders Behnam Neyshabur, Harsh Mehta, Shayan Salehian, and Tara Rezaei lead a 20-person team drawn from Anthropic, xAI, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI aiming to democratize self-accelerating AI R&D and reduce concentration of power in a few labs.
Source evidence

We're thrilled to lead Mirendil's $200M seed round.

Frontier AI work has been locked inside a few big labs.

@MirendilAI is building a system that can help anyone do AI work: they train frontier models that are expert at AI R&D and build the product around it. The result is a system that loops over research and engineering problems on its own, making progress without human intervention.

It's like a coding agent built for AI research that controls its own GPUs.

Mirendil is one of the few teams with the experience and the priors to make the end-to-end system work. @bneyshabur, @HarshMeh1a, @shayan_, and @tararezaeikh come out of Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI.

Welcome to the a16z family, Mirendil.

By @BornsteinMatt and @MaikaThoughts

Behnam Neyshabur (@bneyshabur)

Today, I’m excited to formally announce @MirendilAI with my amazing co-founders Harsh Mehta, Shayan Salehian, and Tara Rezaei!

We’re fortunate to work with @a16z and @kleinerperkins, who led our seed round of $200M, followed by a major investment from NVIDIA, among others.

Mirendil exists to accelerate science and technology, and through them, to help solve humanity's most pressing problems.

Self-accelerating AI R&D is the most direct path to delivering on AI's broader promise, which is why we believe the most important application of AI is AI itself. Get this loop right, and it compounds. It fundamentally changes the rate of progress itself across all domains.

We believe this capability should be democratized. It should be used to power all scientific efforts trying to innovate at the frontier. There are far more important problems—and broader ones—than any single lab can take on, so more groups should be able to pursue them.

This pulls concentration of power away from a few labs: businesses and science labs can own their AI and infrastructure, keep their margins, and control their own destiny instead of ceding it all to a single AI lab.

We’re a small team with a singular focus. Our founding team consists of 20 researchers and engineers from frontier institutions including Anthropic, xAI, Google DeepMind, and OpenAI, united by a passion for science and a drive to build the technologies that move it faster. If you want to build the system that builds systems, join us!

@HarshMeh1a, @shayan_, @tararezaeikh

— https://nitter.net/bneyshabur/status/2069860934148079800#m