Mirendil emerged from stealth June 26, 2026 with 1B valuation — co-led by a16z and Kleiner Perkins, NVIDIA participating. Founded by ex-Anthropic researchers Behnam Neyshabur (CEO) and Harsh Mehta (CTO), plus Shayan Salehian (xAI) and Tara Rezaei (MIT).
~20 researchers/engineers from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI. Building frontier models for AI research automation — experimental design, hyperparameter search, evaluation, iterative training. Targets drug discovery, chemistry, biology, robotics — not consumer chatbots.
Neyshabur co-led Gemini reasoning at Google (5.5 years) before Anthropic (Dec 2024); left Dec 2025 with Mehta. Platform compresses months-long research cycles to days of automated iteration.