Advanced Machine Intelligence Raises $1 billion Seed
AI startup Mirendil has raised $200 million in seed funding at a valuation of roughly $1 billion, marking one of the largest seed rounds in the history of artificial intelligence. Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins co-led the round, with NVIDIA participating alongside additional unnamed investors. Co-founder and CEO Behnam Neyshabur previously worked as a researcher at Anthropic. The founding team of 20 engineers and scientists also includes co-founders Harsh Mehta, Shayan Salehian, and Tara Rezaei, with talent drawn from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and xAI. The company aims to build AI systems capable of automating the AI research and development process itself. At a $1 billion post-money valuation, the $200 million raise implies incoming investors acquired roughly 20% ownership in the company. Mirendil has not disclosed any revenue figures, launched commercial products, or published technical benchmarks as of the announcement date. The company’s focus remains on pre-commercial frontier research rather than near-term product delivery. Neyshabur explained the company’s thesis in a video shared by a16z on X. “When you think about what a scientist or an engineer does, the main skill they have is to get very deep in a domain and build a very sharp expertise that accumulates over time,” Neyshabur stated. Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid described the company as resembling a frontier laboratory focused exclusively on advancing AI research and development capabilities. Matt Bornstein of a16z added that the team is working on one of the major hyperscale challenges in AI, though he declined to share technical specifics about the company’s approach. Mirendil’s $200 million seed round is large by historical standards but still trails the capital secured by comparable newly formed AI labs. Safe Superintelligence, founded by former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, raised approximately $1 billion in 2024 at a $5 billion valuation. Thinking Machines Lab, led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, received a $2 billion commitment from investors despite limited product disclosures. The pattern confirms that venture firms now price pre-product AI research teams the way they once priced late-stage startups, valuing scientific talent and access to compute above commercial traction or revenue. Mirendil’s 20% dilution at the seed stage also signals that its founders retained substantial control, a negotiating position available only to teams with proven frontier lab credentials. NVIDIA’s participation extends its expanding portfolio of AI startup investments across the sector. The chipmaker benefits strategically from funding compute-intensive research laboratories that drive sustained demand for its GPUs during model training and inference workloads. Related: OpenAI Proposes Giving Trump Administration 5% Stake in Company NVIDIA has backed multiple AI startups in recent funding cycles as the boundary between hardware supply and frontier model development continues to blur, turning investment capital into a demand pipeline. Mirendil has not announced a product roadmap or deployment timeline. The company’s next milestones will likely be technical publications or strategic partnership announcements signaling whether its autonomous AI research approach can produce measurable advances ahead of its heavily funded competitors. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
What it does
Ex-OpenAI researchers' Advanced Machine Intelligence raised a record $1.03B seed round backed by NVIDIA, Temasek and Jeff Bezos.
Traction
["NVIDIA", "Temasek", "Jeff Bezos"] participated in the latest tracked round; deeper traction analysis is held until source support is strong enough.
Trend impact
MD-grade thesis held: available source material is not specific enough to support a non-generic investor-economist read without overclaiming.
Funding history
- June 25, 2026 · Seed · $1 billion · ["NVIDIA", "Temasek", "Jeff Bezos"]