Prentis, a brand new AI analysis lab centered on laptop use fashions, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das and tech heavyweights Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, is in talks to lift $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, in keeping with two individuals acquainted with the discussions.
Launched in April, Prentis is coaching fashions to find out how workplace employees navigate routine workflows throughout paperwork and techniques, with the objective of constructing AI brokers that may management computer systems to automate these duties.
Prentis will ostensibly develop brokers tailor-made to those clients’ wants, equivalent to dealing with insurance coverage claims and automating customs responsibility refund exceptions while not having a human to seek out paperwork.
The startup has already signed contracts price as much as $50 million with a number of clients, together with healthcare administration service group, a producer, and items and clothes producers, the 2 individuals acquainted with the discussions inform TechCrunch. This echoes investor supplies obtained by TechCrunch that predict an estimated $75 million annualized run charge by the third quarter of this yr. (Prentis’ pitch deck notes these figures replicate estimated annualized worth primarily based on a contracted charge equal to twenty% of financial savings realized, not acknowledged income, and are “performance-dependent and topic to last execution.”)
By its personal account, Prentis says its Hive-32B mannequin outperforms rivals, together with OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, on two computer-use benchmarks: WindowsAgentArena, which measures end-to-end job completion on actual Home windows purposes, and ScreenSpot-v2, which exams a mannequin’s means to find the fitting on-screen management.
In its pitch deck, the corporate argues its edge comes from working a a lot smaller, cheaper mannequin. In truth, it claims roughly 10 instances decrease value per job than frontier APIs, saying it’s extra economical to deploy throughout on a regular basis workflows. TechCrunch hasn’t independently verified the corporate’s benchmark outcomes.
The startup is betting that automating on a regular basis workplace duties will quickly outpace coding as AI’s greatest use case, however it’s a crowded market. Anthropic, Open AI, and Mira Murati’s Considering Machines Lab are additionally engaged on growing AI brokers for laptop use, one of many sources mentioned. Anthropic has additionally been buying expertise within the class immediately — it purchased the Seattle computer-use startup Vercept earlier this yr, folding in its founders and shutting down its product.
Prentis didn’t reply to TechCrunch’s request for remark.
Ritankar Das, CEO of Prentis, can also be the founding father of Titan, a holding firm that builds and operates AI firms. Das, now 31, was UC Berkeley’s youngest College Medalist in more than a century, graduating at 18 with a double main in bioengineering and chemical biology earlier than incomes a grasp’s in biomedical engineering at Oxford.
He based Titan in 2014 after dropping out of an AI PhD program at Cambridge, the place he’d been a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Das has described Titan as an intentional throwback to an old style holding-company mannequin like Berkshire Hathaway, one which’s funded by its personal exits somewhat than exterior restricted companions.
Different companies launched and operated by Titan embody AI-powered digital care supplier Tala Well being, which raised a $100 million seed spherical final yr, and Forta Well being, an autism care startup that raised $55 million led by Perception Companions in 2024. Titan-founded illness prediction firm Dascena was acquired by CirrusDx in 2022.
Prentis is a aspect venture of kinds for its two different co-founders. Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock companion, mentioned final month that he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board after practically a decade to go “founder mode” on Manas AI, an AI drug-discovery startup he’s additionally backing; he was an early OpenAI investor and co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman earlier than Microsoft absorbed most of that crew in 2024.
Pincus, the Zynga founder, now runs the funding agency Reinvent Capital with Hoffman as a senior adviser, and revealed a memoir, “Life on the Pace of Play,” final month.
Prentis has already employed greater than 25 workers, together with researchers who beforehand labored at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Tencent, and Alibaba, in keeping with its website.
If you buy by hyperlinks in our articles, we might earn a small fee. This doesn’t have an effect on our editorial independence.
