Mirendil Inc., an AI startup, has raised a $200 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Kleiner Perkins and Nvidia Corp. The funding values the company at $1 billion.
The company is led by CEO Behnam Neyshabur, co-inventor of the SAM algorithm, and CTO Harsh Mehta, who previously helped automate research at Anthropic. Their goal is to create an AI system capable of autonomously improving itself, potentially advancing machine learning faster than traditional manual research.
Mirendil plans to offer this technology to scientists in chemistry, medicine, and robotics. The startup will focus on developing novel attention mechanisms for transformer models and using reinforcement learning sandboxes, akin to Google's AlphaGo Zero. It also intends to automate data preparation and debugging to streamline model development.