Former Anthropic employee builds 'self-improving AI,' valuation soars from $1 billion to $5 billion in 3 months

Beating AI News Flash: Mirendil is in talks for a new funding round at a valuation of up to approximately $5 billion, planning to raise up to $1 billion. Kleiner Perkins is in discussions to lead the round, and a16z may also continue to invest. The deal has not yet been finalized.

Just 3 months ago, Mirendil had only just completed a $200 million seed round at a $1 billion valuation, led by a16z and Kleiner Perkins, with Nvidia subsequently participating. If this round closes on the current terms, Mirendil's valuation will have grown to 5 times its previous level within a single quarter.

Mirendil was founded by former Anthropic researchers Behnam Neyshabur, Harsh Mehta, and others, and currently has a team of only just over 20 people. The company focuses on "self-accelerating AI": getting AI to participate in designing experiments, training, evaluation, and tuning, gradually automating the R&D processes originally carried out by AI researchers.

The company is clearly still in a heavy-investment phase. In August, it had just signed a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud, which TechCrunch reported was worth more than $100 million, and will use both TPUs and Nvidia GPUs.

The new funding will mainly be used to release its own models and continue training subsequent models. Its first frontier model for engineering and scientific research is planned for launch in early next year.