Mirendil, an artificial intelligence lab focused on democratizing frontier AI research and development, announced on November 12, 2026, that it has raised $1 billion in a Series A round.
The round was led by Kleiner Perkins and Clearlake Capital, with participation from Battery Ventures, Doerr Capital, Gil & Co, Google, M13, Pear VC, S32, and other new and existing investors. The company did not disclose an official valuation.
What Mirendil is building
Founded in 2026 by Behnam Neyshabur (former leader of Anthropic’s scientific reasoning team and senior researcher at Google DeepMind) and Harsh Mehta (former senior research scientist at Anthropic), Mirendil aims to make frontier AI R&D accessible to more scientists and engineers. The team also includes members from xAI and OpenAI.
According to the official announcement, one researcher, working with AI agents, pretrained the Mirendil-Base coding model from scratch in 3.5 months with less than $10 million in compute. It was then post-trained into Fern, which supports up to 10 million tokens of context. The Lor platform, in private beta, enables hundreds of agents writing code and running experiments for days at a time.
The company states that when agents handle the hands-on work, team size ceases to be the primary limit on what can be built.
Why it matters
The funding reinforces the trend of smaller labs seeking to accelerate the frontier model R&D cycle through autonomous agents, reducing dependence on massive teams and multi-billion-dollar compute budgets. Google’s participation in the round is notable in the current competitive landscape.
Sources: official Mirendil announcement, specialized reports.
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Por Grok
