--- title: “Every few months, a new model made part of our roadmap... description: Anthropic has acqui-hired the team behind Mendral, an AI startup founded by former Docker engineers Sam Alba and Andrea Luzzardi. Mendral built three always-on... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/every-few-months-a-new-model-made-part-of-our-roadmap-unnecessary-why-mendral-s-founders-gave-up-eqi9gu7qa twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: “Every few months, a new model made part of our roadmap unnecessary”: Why Mendral’s founders gave up their startup for Anthropic | daily.dev og:description: Anthropic has acqui-hired the team behind Mendral, an AI startup founded by former Docker engineers Sam Alba and Andrea Luzzardi. Mendral built three always-on... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/every-few-months-a-new-model-made-part-of-our-roadmap-unnecessary-why-mendral-s-founders-gave-up-eqi9gu7qa og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/EqI9Gu7qA.png og:image:alt: “Every few months, a new model made part of our roadmap unnecessary”: Why Mendral’s founders gave up their startup for Anthropic og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # “Every few months, a new model made part of our roadmap unnecessary”: Why Mendral’s founders gave up their startup for Anthropic **[The New Stack](https://daily.dev/sources/newstack)** · 3 min read · 1 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Anthropic has acqui-hired the team behind Mendral, an AI startup founded by former Docker engineers Sam Alba and Andrea Luzzardi. Mendral built three always-on AI agents for CI/CD automation: a Security Agent for detecting leaked secrets and pinning safe dependencies, a Reliability Agent for fixing flaky tests, and a Performance Agent for optimizing build times. The founders cited rapid model progress as a key reason for the move, noting that new Claude releases repeatedly made parts of their roadmap obsolete while opening new possibilities. The acquisition follows Anthropic's earlier purchase of Stainless and signals a broader push to build native enterprise CI/CD tooling directly into Claude's platform. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Why did Mendral shut down its startup and join Anthropic? Mendral's founders, former Docker VP of Engineering Sam Alba and Dagger co-founder Andrea Luzzardi, joined Anthropic in an acqui-hire, winding down Mendral's hosted product and helping customers transition. They said new Claude models kept making parts of their roadmap unnecessary while opening up bigger possibilities, so they chose to build that future from inside Anthropic rather than compete against it. _daily.dev tracks how AI labs are absorbing agent startups reshaping software engineering workflows._ ### What did Mendral's AI agents actually do for CI/CD pipelines? Mendral ran three always-on agents built on Claude: a Security Agent that catches leaked secrets and pins safe dependency versions, a Reliability Agent that mitigates flaky tests, and a Performance Agent that optimizes build times through caching, parallelism, and slow-test pruning. These agents operated inside Blaxel's perpetual sandboxes, isolated agent-native compute with sub-25ms resume from standby. _Teams weighing AI agents for flaky tests and build times can follow this space on daily.dev._ ### What other startups has Anthropic acquired to build out Claude's developer tooling? Anthropic previously acquired Stainless, a startup specializing in SDK generation and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server tooling, earlier in the same year as the Mendral acqui-hire. Both moves fit a pattern of Anthropic absorbing specialized dev-tooling teams to expand Claude's agent capabilities and its ability to connect securely with external systems and enterprise CI/CD pipelines. _Developers evaluating Claude's expanding tool ecosystem can keep up with these acquisitions on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Anthropic acquires Stainless to strengthen Claude’s developer tooling](https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-acquires-stainless-to-strengthen-claude-s-developer-tooling-aum3ptkiv) · InfoWorld · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Anthropic has acquired the dev tools startup used by OpenAI, Google, and Cloudflare](https://daily.dev/posts/anthropic-has-acquired-the-dev-tools-startup-used-by-openai-google-and-cloudflare-rkx2dinzv) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Why Anthropic’s Claude Code Security matters and what it means for Mend.io customers](https://daily.dev/posts/why-anthropic-s-claude-code-security-matters-and-what-it-means-for-mend-io-customers-rcphbctom) · Security Boulevard · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#cicd](https://daily.dev/tags/cicd), [#claude](https://daily.dev/tags/claude), [#anthropic](https://daily.dev/tags/anthropic) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/every-few-months-a-new-model-made-part-of-our-roadmap-unnecessary-why-mendral-s-founders-gave-up-eqi9gu7qa) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"“Every few months, a new model made part of our roadmap unnecessary”: Why Mendral’s founders gave up their startup for Anthropic","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/every-few-months-a-new-model-made-part-of-our-roadmap-unnecessary-why-mendral-s-founders-gave-up-eqi9gu7qa","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/every-few-months-a-new-model-made-part-of-our-roadmap-unnecessary-why-mendral-s-founders-gave-up-eqi9gu7qa"},"datePublished":"2026-07-22T16:48:06.555Z","dateModified":"2026-09-14T08:29:44.864Z","description":"Anthropic has acqui-hired the team behind Mendral, an AI startup founded by former Docker engineers Sam Alba and Andrea Luzzardi. 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