Former xAI product engineer Drake Wong publicly bids farewell: he spent about 20 months at xAI, where he worked two all-nighters in the conference room to create the first version of Grok.com, subsequently handling product layers such as thinking and tool invocation, in-line rendering cards, multi-agent systems, and Grok Computer, among others, and mentioned there are projects he cannot discuss yet. His next step is to "go touch some grass" before moving to Mirendil.

Wong's entry into xAI was not through conventional recruitment. In 2023, he co-founded the developer-focused AI observability company IUDEX with Arno Gau, where Wong served as co-founder and technical lead, while Gau came from the engineering side of Scale AI; IUDEX was later registered as stagnant, and the team merged into xAI to work on Grok. His public resume is a narrow track: a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics and data science from UC Berkeley, doing nuclear methods at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in his senior year and publishing libraries on PyPI, then moving to the quantitative fund Voleon to build machine learning production pipelines, followed by a stint at Scale AI where he increased the recurring revenue of the visual data platform from about $50,000 to approximately $12 million, before returning to engineering to lead the backend of a generative platform and then starting a venture in observability.

Mirendil is not taking on another chat interface. The company raised $200 million in seed funding led by a16z and Kleiner Perkins in June 2026, with a valuation of about $1 billion, and NVIDIA participating; the founding team of about 20 people comes from Anthropic, xAI, DeepMind, and OpenAI, and at the time of the announcement, there were no market-facing products. CEO Behnam Neyshabur is a co-inventor of the SAM optimizer, has done inference research related to Blueshift and Minerva at Google, and later participated in Discovery at Anthropic; co-founder Harsh Mehta developed the initial version of an internal automated research platform at Anthropic, along with early xAI member Shayan Salehian and MIT alum Tara Rezaei. The recruitment page features a position directly named "Recursive Self-Improvement."

a16z describes the product as "an AI research programming agent that manages its own GPUs": first training cutting-edge models proficient in AI research and then wrapping the product around the model, allowing the system to autonomously cycle through research and engineering problems, reducing human intervention, and offering it to scientists and engineers outside laboratory fortresses, covering specialized models in chemistry, medicine, materials, and robotics. Neyshabur states it is "an AI on top of AI that serves science," rather than just creating another general chat bot. The seed round size is about dozens of times the median seed round in the U.S., buying a research closed loop that spills out of laboratories, not verified revenue.

xAI is concurrently undergoing restructuring. After SpaceX acquired xAI, it was made a subsidiary, and Musk has publicly stated that xAI "was not built correctly the first time and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up"; co-founders Tony Wu, Jimmy Ba, and others have already left. Wong described xAI as "a peak experience where you can directly get hands-on, and projects drag people into the full stack," leaving without discussing bets or options, only a product list. Talent is flowing from the application layer that worked on Grok interactions to the research layer where experimental design, evaluation, and iterative training are run by the models themselves.

In market mechanisms, the buyers are a16z, Kleiner Perkins, and NVIDIA, purchasing a team capable of selling "automated research" from large laboratories; the sellers are research and product engineers coming from Anthropic and xAI, exchanging their resumes for about 20% equity in the seed round. The driving event is that laboratories lock self-improvement capabilities within their walls, and external universities and hospitals cannot access equivalent tools. Funding comes from chip manufacturers and dollar funds into a San Francisco team of about 20, which then rents GPUs and time. Beneficiaries are new companies that can price "research agents" and NVIDIA, which sells chips into this closed loop; under pressure are teams that continue to use human labor to build superficial chat applications and must offer high salaries to keep the same group of people within the walls of cutting-edge laboratories.

Source: Public information