source: techcrunch ai: prentis, new ai lab co-founded by reid hoffman, mark pincus in talks to raise $100m
level: business
prentis, a new ai research lab co-founded by ritankar das, reid hoffman, and mark pincus, is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation. the startup trains models to learn how office workers navigate routine workflows across documents and systems. its goal is to build ai agents that can control computers to automate tasks like handling insurance claims and customs duty refunds.
the company has already signed contracts worth up to $50 million with several customers, including a healthcare management organization and manufacturers. its pitch deck projects an estimated $75 million annualized run rate by the third quarter of this year, though those figures are based on a fee equal to 20% of savings realized and depend on performance. prentis claims its hive-32b model outperforms openai's gpt-5.4 and anthropic's claude opus 4.6 on two computer-use benchmarks, while costing roughly 10 times less per task.
the market for computer-use ai agents is crowded, with anthropic, openai, and thinking machines lab also developing similar technology. prentis has hired over 25 employees, including researchers from openai, google deepmind, and meta. ceo ritankar das previously founded titan, a holding company that builds ai businesses, and was uc berkeley's youngest university medalist.
why it matters: automating routine office tasks with ai agents could reshape enterprise productivity, making it a key area for data science and ai investment.
source: techcrunch ai: prentis, new ai lab co-founded by reid hoffman, mark pincus in talks to raise $100m