Marendel raises $1 billion Series A led by Kleiner Perkins
The new AI research lab secured $1 billion in funding to build models and agents for AI research. Its founders claim a single researcher pre-trained a base model in 3.5 months using under $10 million in compute.
Marendel, a newly established AI research lab, has raised a $1 billion Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins and Clear Lake. The company is developing models and agents specifically for AI research, including a coding model known as Marendal Base. Marendel positions itself as a frontier lab competing with established players such as Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The fundraising pitch emphasized the efficiency of its initial model development, suggesting that the new capital will enable significantly scaled operations.
According to the company, a single researcher worked with agents to pre-train Marendal Base from scratch in 3.5 months, utilizing less than $10 million in compute. This efficiency is central to Marendel’s value proposition, highlighting the potential of agent-assisted research workflows. The lab also maintains a separate researcher model designed for scientific applications. With the new funding, Marendel intends to expand its capabilities in building foundational models and autonomous agents for complex research tasks.