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

Prentis, a new AI research lab focused on computational models, co-founded by entrepreneur Ritankar Das and tech giants 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 is a training model to learn how office workers navigate workflows across documents and programs, with the goal of building AI agents that can control computers to perform those tasks automatically.

Prentis will clearly develop agents tailored to the needs of these customers, such as handling insurance claims and automating tax return transactions without the need for someone to hunt for paperwork.

The startup has already signed contracts worth up to $50 million with several clients, including a healthcare management service organization, a manufacturer, and clothing and apparel manufacturers, two people familiar with the negotiations told TechCrunch. This is similar to investor material obtained by TechCrunch that predicts an operating average of approximately $75 million annually in the third quarter of this year. (Prentis’ stake notes that those figures reflect an annualized estimate based on a contract value equal to 20% of savings, not recognized revenue, and are “subject to performance and subject to finalization.”)

By its account, Prentis says its Hive-32B model outperforms its competitors, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, in two computing benchmarks: WindowsAgentArena, which measures end-to-end execution in real Windows applications, and ScreenSpot-v2, which can control the screen model.

In its pitch deck, the company argues that its edge comes from using a much smaller, cheaper model. In fact, it costs about 10 times less per transaction than borderline APIs, making it more cost-effective to distribute throughout the day-to-day operation. TechCrunch has not independently verified the company’s benchmark results.

Starting bets are that automating everyday office tasks will overtake coding as the biggest use case for AI, but it’s a crowded market. Anthropic, Open AI, and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab are also working to develop AI agents for computing, one of the sources said. Anthropic is also acquiring talent in the sector directly — it bought Seattle-based computing startup Vercept earlier this year, folded its founders and shuttered 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 deploys AI companies. Das, now 31, was the youngest graduate of UC Berkeley in more than a century, graduating at 18 with a double degree in bioengineering and chemical biology before earning a master’s degree in biomedical engineering at Oxford.

He founded Titan in 2014 after leaving the AI ​​PhD program at Cambridge, where he had been a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Das described Titan as a deliberate throwback to the model of an old-fashioned holding company like Berkshire Hathaway, which is financed by its exit from limited foreign partners.

Other startups launched and run by Titan include AI-powered virtual care provider Tala Health, which raised $100 million in seed funding last year, and Forta Health, an autism care startup that raised $55 million led by Insight Partners in 2024. Titan-founded disease forecasting company Dascena was acquired by CirrusDx in 2022.

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

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

Prentis has already hired more than 25 employees, including researchers who have worked at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Tencent, and Alibaba, according to its website.