Prentis, an AI lab co-founded by Reid Hoffman, in talks for $100M

Prentis, a new AI research lab focused on computer-use models, is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to two people familiar with the discussions. The startup was co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das along with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga founder Mark Pincus, and launched in April.

Prentis trains models to learn how office workers navigate routine workflows across documents and systems, aiming to build AI agents that can control computers to automate tasks such as handling insurance claims and automating customs duty refund exceptions without a human hunting down paperwork. The two people familiar with the discussions told TechCrunch that Prentis has already signed contracts worth up to $50 million with customers including a healthcare management service organization, a manufacturer, and goods and clothing manufacturers. Investor materials obtained by TechCrunch predict an estimated $75 million annualized run rate by the third quarter of this year, though Prentis’s pitch deck notes those figures reflect estimated annualized value tied to a fee equal to 20% of savings realized — not recognized revenue — and are “performance-dependent and subject to final execution.”

Prentis says its Hive-32B model outperforms rivals including OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 on two computer-use benchmarks, WindowsAgentArena and ScreenSpot-v2, and claims roughly 10 times lower cost per task than frontier APIs. TechCrunch hasn’t independently verified the company’s benchmark results. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab are also developing AI agents for computer use, one of the sources said; Anthropic has additionally acquired the Seattle computer-use startup Vercept this year, folding in its founders and shutting down its product.

Das, 31, also runs Titan, a holding company he founded in 2014 that has launched businesses including Tala Health, which raised a $100 million seed round last year, and Forta Health, which raised $55 million led by Insight Partners in 2024; another Titan company, Dascena, was acquired by CirrusDx in 2022. Hoffman, who said last month he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board after nearly a decade to focus on drug-discovery startup Manas AI, previously co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman before Microsoft absorbed most of that team in 2024. Pincus now runs investment firm Reinvent Capital with Hoffman as a senior adviser. Prentis has hired more than 25 employees, including researchers formerly of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Tencent, and Alibaba. Prentis didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Why it matters

Prentis is betting that automating everyday office work will overtake coding as AI’s biggest use case, but it’s entering a crowded field where Anthropic, OpenAI, and well-funded rivals are already racing to build — and acquire their way into — computer-use agents.