Mirendil, founded by ex-Anthropic and xAI researchers, has raised a $200 million seed at a $1 billion valuation to build AI that can carry out AI research on its own.

Its frontier models are trained to be expert at AI R&D, looping over research and engineering problems autonomously so anyone can build specialized models without a frontier lab.

a16z and Kleiner Perkins co-led the round, with Nvidia joining. The team aims to let scientists and developers spin up their own specialized in-house models in fields like medicine and materials.