Mirendil Spends Half Its Seed Round on Google Compute
TechCrunch reported exclusively on August 6 that Mirendil has signed a multiyear deal with Google Cloud worth upward of $100 million, giving the startup access to TPUs, Nvidia GPUs and managed training clusters (techcrunch.com). For context on the audacity: Mirendil raised a $200 million seed at a $1 billion valuation in late June — one of the largest seed rounds ever — founded by researchers who quit Anthropic after roughly a year, with Behnam Neyshabur as CEO. They just committed half the seed to compute.
What the compute is for: self-improving AI. Mirendil's stated goal is a system that can eventually do the work of an entire frontier AI lab — propose research, run it, learn, repeat — and then point that loop at medicine, biology and materials science. If that sounds familiar, it should: Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals announced Discovery Loop twenty-four hours earlier with essentially the same thesis. Two of the most credentialed teams in AI landed on automate-the-research-loop in the same news cycle.
The deal structure is also worth a look. Google invested in Discovery Loop; Google Cloud is now Mirendil's compute landlord. Whichever lab wins the autoresearch race, Google collects — equity in one, nine figures of cloud revenue from the other. The picks-and-shovels position in the automation-of-science gold rush is being assembled in plain sight. And for everyone tracking where frontier talent believes the leverage is: the people leaving Anthropic and Google are not starting model companies. They are starting loop companies, and paying whatever compute costs to close the loop first.
← Back to all articles
What the compute is for: self-improving AI. Mirendil's stated goal is a system that can eventually do the work of an entire frontier AI lab — propose research, run it, learn, repeat — and then point that loop at medicine, biology and materials science. If that sounds familiar, it should: Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le and Oriol Vinyals announced Discovery Loop twenty-four hours earlier with essentially the same thesis. Two of the most credentialed teams in AI landed on automate-the-research-loop in the same news cycle.
The deal structure is also worth a look. Google invested in Discovery Loop; Google Cloud is now Mirendil's compute landlord. Whichever lab wins the autoresearch race, Google collects — equity in one, nine figures of cloud revenue from the other. The picks-and-shovels position in the automation-of-science gold rush is being assembled in plain sight. And for everyone tracking where frontier talent believes the leverage is: the people leaving Anthropic and Google are not starting model companies. They are starting loop companies, and paying whatever compute costs to close the loop first.
Comments