Prentis, a new AI research lab focused on computer use models, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das, and tech heavyweights Reid Hoffman and Marc 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 is training models to learn how office workers navigate routine workflows across 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 duty refund exceptions without needing a human to hunt down paperwork.
The startup has already signed contracts worth up to $50 million with several customers, including healthcare management service organization, a manufacturer, and goods and clothing manufactures, the two people familiar with the discussions tell TechCrunch, echoing investor materials obtained by TechCrunch that predict an estimated $75 million annualized run rate by the third quarter of this year. (Prentis’s pitch deck notes those figures reflect estimated annualized value based on a contracted fee equal to 20% of savings realized, not recognized revenue, and are “performance-dependent and subject to final execution.”)
By its own account, 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, which measures end-to-end task completion on real Windows applications; and ScreenSpot-v2, which tests a model’s ability to locate the right on-screen control.
In its pitch deck, the company argues its edge comes from running a much smaller, cheaper model. In fact, it claims roughly 10 times lower cost per task than frontier APIs, saying it’s more economical to deploy across everyday workflows. TechCrunch hasn’t independently verified the company’s benchmark results.
The startup is betting that automating everyday office tasks will soon outpace coding as AI’s biggest use case, but it’s a crowded market. Anthropic, Open AI, and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines are also working on developing AI agents for computer use, one of sources said. Anthropic has also been acquiring talent in the category directly — it bought the Seattle computer-use startup Vercept earlier this year, folding in its founders and shutting down its product.
Prentis didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Ritankar Das, CEO of Prantis, is also the founder of Titan, a holding company that builds and operates AI companies. Das, now 31, was UC Berkeley’s youngest University Medalist in more than a century, graduating at 18 with a double major in bioengineering and chemical biology before earning a master’s in biomedical engineering at Oxford.
He founded Titan in 2014 after dropping out of an AI PhD program at Cambridge, where he’d been a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Das has described Titan as an intentional throwback to an old-fashioned holding-company model like Berkshire Hathaway, one that’s funded by its own exits rather than outside limited partners.
Other businesses launched and operated by Titan include AI-powered virtual care provider Tala Health, which raised a $100 million seed round last year, and Forta Health, an autism care startup that raised $55 million led by Insight Partners in 2024. Titan-founded disease prediction company Dascena was acquired by CirrusDx in 2022.
Prentis is a side project of sorts for its two other co-founders. Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner, said last month that he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board after nearly a decade to go “founder mode” on Manas AI, an AI drug-discovery startup he’s also backing; he was an early OpenAI investor and co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman before Microsoft absorbed most of that team in 2024.
Pincus, the Zynga founder, now runs the investment firm Reinvent Capital with Hoffman as a senior adviser, and published a memoir, “Life at the Speed of Play,” last month.
Prentis has already hired more than 25 employees, including researchers who previously worked at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Tencent and Alibaba, according to its website.
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