Technology and Science25 July, 20262 min read
Prentis AI Lab Co-Founded by Reid Hoffman Seeks $100 Million Funding at $1 Billion Valuation
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Prentis AI lab launched in April by Ritankar Das, Reid Hoffman, and Mark Pincus. In talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation.
Prentis seeks $100M
Prentis, a new AI research lab co-founded by Ritankar Das, 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. TechCrunch says Prentis launched in April and is training models to learn how office workers navigate routine workflows across documents and systems in order to build AI agents that can control computers to automate those tasks. The startup has already signed contracts worth up to $50 million with several customers, including a healthcare management service organization and a manufacturer, TechCrunch reports.
Investor materials obtained by TechCrunch predict an estimated $75 million annualized run rate by the third quarter of this year, while Prentis’ pitch deck says the figures reflect estimated annualized value based on a contracted fee equal to 20% of savings realized rather than recognized revenue. TechCrunch adds that 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.
Benchmarks and claims
TechCrunch reports that 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. In its pitch deck, Prentis argues its edge comes from running a much smaller, cheaper model, and TechCrunch says the company claims roughly 10 times lower cost per task than frontier APIs. TechCrunch also notes that it has not independently verified Prentis’ benchmark results, and that Prentis did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
The wider competitive field includes Anthropic, Open AI, and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, which one source told TechCrunch are also working on developing AI agents for computer use. TechCrunch says Anthropic has been acquiring talent in the category directly, including buying the Seattle computer-use startup Vercept earlier this year, folding in its founders and shutting down its product.
Founders, funding math
Ritankar Das, now 31, is the CEO of Prentis and also the founder of Titan, a holding company that builds and operates AI companies, TechCrunch says. TechCrunch reports that Das 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. Das founded Titan in 2014 after dropping out of an AI PhD program at Cambridge, where he’d been a Gates Cambridge Scholar, and TechCrunch says Titan is described as an intentional throwback to an old-fashioned holding-company model like Berkshire Hathaway.
TechCrunch adds that Prentis is a side project for its two other co-founders, with Hoffman stepping down from Microsoft’s board after nearly a decade to go “founder mode” on Manas AI, and with Pincus running the investment firm Reinvent Capital and publishing the memoir “Life at the Speed of Play,” last month. The stakes for Prentis, as framed by TechCrunch, include whether automating everyday office tasks will outpace coding as AI’s biggest use case in a crowded market where major labs are already building computer-use agents.