Mirendil raises $1B Series A led by Kleiner Perkins and Clearlake

Mirendil has raised a $1 billion Series A led by Kleiner Perkins and Clearlake Capital, the company announced Nov. 12. The Mirendil $1B Series A gives the young AI research-tools company a financing round five times the size of the $200 million seed round it raised less than six months earlier, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Battery Ventures, Doerr Capital, Gil & Co, Google, M13, Pear VC and S32 also participated, alongside other new and existing investors, Mirendil said. The San Francisco-based startup did not disclose its valuation or provide a detailed breakdown of how it will use the capital.

The deal confirms the size and lead investors of a financing that Bloomberg reported in September was being discussed at as much as $1 billion. Bloomberg's report described talks around a $5 billion valuation including the new investment, but those were prospective terms. Mirendil's completed Series A announcement does not confirm that valuation.

What does Mirendil's Lor platform do?

Mirendil is selling a case for reducing the staff required to develop advanced AI models. Its main product, Lor, is in private beta. The company describes it as a platform that deploys hundreds of agents to write code and run experiments over periods of days, and says it uses the system internally.

Lor is distinct from Mirendil-Base, the company's coding-focused base model, and Fern, a specialized coding model derived from that base model. Mirendil says Fern can support up to 10 million tokens of context. Those product and performance descriptions come from Mirendil, rather than independent testing.

The company also says that one researcher working with agents pretrained Mirendil-Base in 3.5 months for less than $10 million in compute. It has presented that effort as evidence that agent-based automation can take on work normally done by a larger research team. The supplied reporting does not independently verify the cost, development timeline or resulting model performance.

For investors, the round is a large commitment to a company whose pitch sits between AI developer tooling and frontier-model development. Mirendil says it wants to make frontier AI research and development accessible to more scientists and engineers. Its announcement provides no revenue, customer, headcount or deployment figures, leaving the commercial traction of Lor unclear.

The prior $200 million seed, reported by the Journal and described by Bloomberg as valuing the company at $1 billion, arrived only months before this Series A. The new round brings more capital behind Mirendil's approach, but its disclosed terms leave unanswered how the company is priced and how quickly its private-beta product will reach customers.

This story draws on original reporting from SiliconANGLE.