Prentis, New AI Lab Co-Founded by Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, in Talks to Raise $100M

Prentis, an emerging AI research lab specializing in computer-use models and co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das alongside tech industry veterans Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, is currently negotiating to secure $100 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

Since its launch in April, Prentis has been training models to master the routine workflows office workers navigate across various documents and systems, aiming to create AI agents capable of controlling computers to automate these tasks.

Prentis intends to develop agents customized to specific customer needs, such as processing insurance claims and automating customs duty refund exceptions, thereby eliminating the need for humans to manually track down paperwork.

The startup has already secured contracts totaling up to $50 million with several clients, including a healthcare management service organization, a manufacturer, and goods and clothing producers, according to the two sources speaking to TechCrunch. This aligns with investor materials obtained by TechCrunch, which project an estimated annualized run rate of $75 million by the third quarter of this year. (Prentis’ pitch deck clarifies that these figures represent estimated annualized value based on a contracted fee equal to 20% of realized savings, rather than recognized revenue, and are “performance-dependent and subject to final execution.”)

According to its own claims, Prentis states that its Hive-32B model surpasses competitors, 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 correct on-screen control.

In its pitch deck, the company argues that its competitive advantage stems from running a significantly smaller and more cost-effective model. It claims to achieve roughly 10 times lower cost per task compared to frontier APIs, making it more economical for deployment across everyday workflows. TechCrunch has not independently verified the company’s benchmark results.

The startup is betting that automating routine office tasks will soon surpass coding as AI’s primary use case, though it operates in a crowded market. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab are also developing AI agents for computer use, according to one source. Anthropic has also been directly acquiring talent in this space—it acquired the Seattle-based computer-use startup Vercept earlier this year, integrating its founders while shutting 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 ventures. Das, now 31, was UC Berkeley’s youngest University Medalist in over a century, graduating at age 18 with double majors in bioengineering and chemical biology before earning a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Oxford.

He established Titan in 2014 after leaving an AI PhD program at Cambridge, where he had been a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Das has described Titan as a deliberate return to a traditional holding-company model akin to Berkshire Hathaway, funded by its own exits rather than outside limited partners.

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

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

Pincus, founder of Zynga, now runs the investment firm Reinvent Capital with Hoffman serving as a senior adviser, and published his 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.