Prentis, a brand new AI analysis lab centered on pc use fashions, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das, and tech heavyweights Reid Hoffman and Marc Pincus, is in talks to boost $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, in line with two individuals acquainted with the discussions.
Launched in April, Prentis is coaching fashions to learn the way workplace employees navigate routine workflows throughout paperwork and methods, 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, comparable to dealing with insurance coverage claims and automating customs responsibility refund exceptions with no need 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 manufactures, the 2 individuals acquainted with the discussions inform TechCrunch, echoing investor supplies obtained by TechCrunch that predict an estimated $75 million annualized run price by the third quarter of this 12 months. (Prentis’s pitch deck notes these figures mirror 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 remaining 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 activity completion on actual Home windows functions; and ScreenSpot-v2, which checks a mannequin’s capability to find the fitting on-screen management.
In its pitch deck, the corporate argues its edge comes from operating a a lot smaller, cheaper mannequin. In truth, it claims roughly 10 instances decrease price per activity 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 are additionally engaged on growing AI brokers for pc use, one in all sources stated. Anthropic has additionally been buying expertise within the class immediately — it purchased the Seattle computer-use startup Vercept earlier this year, folding in its founders and shutting down its product.
Prentis didn’t reply to TechCrunch’s request for remark.
Ritankar Das, CEO of Prantis, 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 school holding-company mannequin like Berkshire Hathaway, one which’s funded by its personal exits slightly than outdoors 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 12 months, 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 undertaking of kinds for its two different co-founders. Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock associate, stated final month that he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board after almost 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 group in 2024.
Pincus, the Zynga founder, now runs the funding agency Reinvent Capital with Hoffman as a senior adviser, and printed a memoir, “Life on the Pace of Play,” final month.
Prentis has already employed greater than 25 staff, together with researchers who beforehand labored at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Tencent and Alibaba, in line with its website.
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