Prentis, new AI lab co-founded by Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus in talks to raise $100M

Prentisa new AI research lab focused on computing utility models co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das and tech heavyweights Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

Launched in April, Prentis trains models to learn how office workers navigate routine workflows between documents and systems, with the goal of building AI agents that can control computers to automate those tasks.

Prentis will ostensibly develop agents tailored to these customers’ needs, such as handling insurance claims and automating customs reimbursement exceptions without the need for a human to hunt for paperwork.

The startup has already signed contracts worth up to $50 million with several customers, including a healthcare management services organization, a manufacturer and goods and apparel makers, the two people familiar with the discussions told TechCrunch. This reflects investor material obtained by TechCrunch that predicts an estimated annual run rate of $75 million in the third quarter of this year. (Prentis’ pitch deck notes that these figures reflect estimated annualized value based on a contractual fee equal to 20% of realized savings, unrecognized revenue, and that they are “performance based and subject to final execution.”)

Prentis says its Hive-32B model outperforms competitors, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, on two computing benchmarks: WindowsAgentArena, which measures end-to-end task completion on real Windows applications, and ScreenSpot-v2, which tests a model’s ability to find the right on-screen controls.

In its pitch deck, the company argues that its advantage comes from running a much smaller, cheaper model. In fact, it claims roughly 10 times lower cost per task than frontier APIs, and says it is more cost-effective to implement in everyday workflows. TechCrunch has not independently verified the company’s benchmark results.

The startup is betting that automating daily office tasks will soon surpass coding as AI’s biggest use case, but it’s a crowded market. Anthropic, Open AI and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab are also working on developing AI agents for computing, one of the sources said. Anthropic has also acquired talent directly in this category: It bought Seattle computer startup Vercept earlier this year, brought in its founders and shut down its product.

Prentis did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Ritankar Das, CEO of Prentis, is also the founder of Titan, a holding company that builds and operates AI companies. Das, now 31, was UC Berkeley’s youngest college medalist more than a centurygraduated at age 18 with a double major in bioengineering and chemical biology before earning a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Oxford.

He founded Titan in 2014 after dropping out of an AI PhD program at Cambridge, where he had been a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Das has described Titan as a deliberate return to an old-fashioned holding company model like Berkshire Hathaway, one funded by its own exits rather than external limited partners.

Other companies launched and operated by Titan include AI-powered virtual healthcare provider Tala Health, which has a $100 million seed last year, and Forta Health, an autism care startup that raised funding $55 million led by Insight Partners in 2024. Titan-founded disease prediction company Dascena was bought by CirrusDx in 2022.

Prentis is a kind of side project for the two other co-founders. Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner, said last month that he is stepping down from Microsoft’s board of directors after nearly a decade to go into “founder mode” at Manas AI, an AI drug discovery startup that he also backs; he was an early OpenAI investor and co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman before Microsoft folded most of that team in 2024.

Pincus, the founder of Zynga, now runs the investment firm Reinvent Capital with Hoffman as a senior advisor, and last month published a memoir, “Life at the Speed ​​of Play.”

Prentis has already hired more than 25 employees, including researchers who previously worked at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Tencent and Alibaba, the company said. website.