Prentis, New AI Lab Co-Founded by Reid Hoffman, Marc Pincus, in Talks to Raise $100M at $1B Valuation

Prentis, a new AI research lab specializing in computer-use models, is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to two people familiar with the discussions, as reported exclusively by TechCrunch. The lab was co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das, LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman, and Zynga founder Marc Pincus, and launched in April 2026.

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. The startup develops agents tailored to customer needs such as handling insurance claims and automating customs duty refund exceptions without requiring a human to track down paperwork.

The startup has already signed contracts worth up to $50 million with several customers, including a healthcare management service organization, a manufacturer, and goods and clothing manufacturers. Investor materials obtained by TechCrunch project an estimated $75 million annualized run rate by the third quarter of this year, though the pitch deck notes the figures are performance-dependent and subject to final execution.

Prentis claims 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. TechCrunch has not independently verified the company's benchmark results.

The company argues its edge comes from running a much smaller, cheaper model, claiming roughly 10 times lower cost per task than frontier APIs. It is betting that automating everyday office tasks will soon outpace coding as AI's biggest use case, but faces a crowded market with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Mira Murati's Thinking Machines all working on similar computer-use agents.

Das, now 31, is also the founder of Titan, a holding company that builds and operates AI companies. He was UC Berkeley's youngest University Medalist in more than a century, graduating at 18 with a double major before earning a master's at Oxford. 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.

The funding round, if completed, would signal strong investor confidence in the emerging computer-use AI category. The key question is whether Prentis can maintain its claimed performance and cost advantages as better-resourced competitors pour into the same space.