Woofun AI reports that Mirendil, an AI startup founded by former Anthropic researchers Behnam Neyshabur and Harsh Mehta, has closed a $200 million seed round. The financing values the company at $1 billion and was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Nvidia. Mirendil aims to develop autonomously optimizing, recursively self-improving models to assist scientists in creating domain-specific AI for fields such as medicine and materials science.

The founders, who previously worked at Google and joined Anthropic in late 2024, resigned after the release of Claude Opus 4.5 in December 2025. The founding team also includes former xAI member Shayan Salehian and MIT graduate Tara Rezaei. While major labs restrict external use of their models for competitive training, Mirendil asserts that secure oversight enables self-improvement to accelerate scientific research. The company plans to release models and products in the coming months.