Analysis
Mirendil raised $1 billion in a Series A led by Kleiner Perkins and Clearlake Capital, the San Francisco AI lab announced on November 12, 2026, in a PR Newswire release. Battery Ventures, Doerr Capital, Gil & Co, Google, M13, Pear VC and S32 participated, among other new and existing investors. The release does not state a valuation.
What changed since the September talks
Pulse reported in September that Mirendil was in talks to raise up to $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation, with Kleiner Perkins in talks to lead, as Bloomberg reported and Dealroom summarized. Three things are new. The round has closed at the full $1 billion. Clearlake Capital joined Kleiner as co-lead. And Mirendil chose not to publish a price, so the $5 billion figure remains a report on talks, not a confirmed mark. The SaaS News also lists the round as closed on November 12 with the same two leads and no valuation.
What does Mirendil do?
Mirendil builds AI agents that carry out the work of AI research itself: writing code, running experiments and training models over long stretches with little human input. The company is led by CEO Behnam Neyshabur and CTO Harsh Mehta, per SiliconANGLE, which describes Neyshabur as a co-inventor of SAM, an algorithm for improving the output quality of AI models, and says Mehta helped launch Anthropic's efforts to automate parts of its internal research program.
“And Mirendil chose not to publish a price, so the $5 billion figure remains a report on talks, not a confirmed mark.”
The release names three products:
- Mirendil-Base -- a coding model that one researcher, working with agents, pretrained from scratch in 3.5 months with less than $10M in compute, per the company
- Fern -- Mirendil-Base post-trained to hold up to 10M tokens of context, which the company says is enough for days of an agent's work
- Lor -- an agent research environment, now in private beta, where hundreds of agents write code and run experiments for days at a time
The company calls itself "still a small team" and gives no headcount. Pulse has also covered Mirendil's Google Cloud deal, and Google is now on the Series A list.
How much has Mirendil raised?
Mirendil has announced $1.2 billion across two rounds, a Pulse desk sum of the seed and the Series A, both equity:
- Jun 2026, seed -- $200M at a $1B valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz with Kleiner Perkins and Nvidia participating, per SiliconANGLE
- Nov 2026, Series A -- $1B, led by Kleiner Perkins and Clearlake Capital, valuation not disclosed (release)
The Series A is five times the size of the seed, raised under five months after the seed was announced on June 25. Dealroom says Kleiner co-led the seed with Andreessen Horowitz; SiliconANGLE names Andreessen Horowitz as the lead. Andreessen Horowitz does not appear among the Series A investors the release names.
Value Add VC data
- Jun 2026, Seed -- $200M at $1B, led by Andreessen Horowitz (source)
- Nov 2026, Series A -- $1B at an undisclosed valuation, led by Kleiner Perkins and Clearlake Capital (source)
No verified Series A valuation, so no markup multiple. For scale against other AI rounds on this week's page:
- [LangChain](/pulse/langchain-300m-3b-valuation-capitalg-2026) -- $300M at a $3B valuation, led by CapitalG
- [Fractile](/pulse/fractile-720m-series-c-7b-valuation-thrive-2026) -- a confirmed $720M Series C
Mirendil's Series A is larger than either, for a company that has not yet shipped its main product beyond a private beta.
The case against the round
The headline efficiency claim, a competitive coding model for less than $10M of compute, is the company's own and comes with no published benchmark in the release. A $1 billion raise also cuts against that pitch: if agents make research cheap, the money has to be going to compute and hiring at a scale the release does not describe. Clearlake Capital is a private-equity firm rather than a classic venture lead, and the Series A carries no disclosed valuation or terms. Lor's move from private beta to general availability is the milestone that will show whether outside teams pay for it.
Kleiner Perkins' other bets are tracked on its investor page, and Mirendil's file lives on the Mirendil hub.