(Bloomberg) -- Mirendil, an artificial intelligence startup launched by former Anthropic PBC researchers, is in talks to raise a new round of funding at a $5 billion valuation, including the investment, according to people familiar with the matter.Kleiner Perkins is in talks to lead the current financing effort, which could bring up to $1 billion in new capital to the startup, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to discussing sensitive information. Andreessen Horowitz is in discussions to invest in the round as well, the people said.
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The discussions come three months after it was announced that Kleiner and Andreessen led a $200 million seed round for the young startup. That deal valued the business at $1 billion in its first round of financing.
Mirendil, now with more than 20 staffers, was started earlier this year with the goal of building widely accessible models capable of improving themselves with little to no help from humans. Some firms see this strategy, also known as "recursive self-improvement," as the future of AI development, but there have also been concerns about the security threats this form of AI could pose if it's achieved.
The new funding would be used to help the startup launch its own model and train future ones. It's planning to launch a frontier model to support engineering and research work by the beginning of next year, according to two of the people.Mirendil declined to comment for the story.
The deal talks suggest continued investor demand for neo-labs, or companies that are prioritizing ambitious research projects over short-term commercialization. A number of neo-labs have been on the fundraising circuit, including Thinking Machines Lab, which was started by OpenAI's former chief technology officer, and Periodic Labs, a scientific discovery company. There's also growing interest from software startups looking to build their own models in-house, driven by progress in open-source AI's capabilities.
"Today, any lab trying to use AI in drug discovery, chemistry, biology, or robotics must also become a frontier AI lab – a process that is expensive and requires expertise concentrated in a small number of labs," Mirendil's website reads. " Our goal is to democratize frontier AI R&D and make it widely accessible."Recursive self-improvement is a massive area of interest for the leading AI developers, including Anthropic and OpenAI, because of its potential to speed the pace of innovation. For example, Anthropic recently shared that its Claude chatbot drives more than a quarter of the company's research and development work for AI. OpenAI, meanwhile, extensively uses its coding technology, Codex, to automate its own software and model development.