Prentice, the new AI lab co-founded by Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, is in talks to raise $100 million

Prentiss, a new artificial intelligence research lab focused on computer usage models, co-founded by serial entrepreneur 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.

Launched in April, Prentis’ training models how office workers navigate routine workflows across documents and systems, with the goal of building artificial intelligence 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 track down paperwork.

The startup has already signed contracts worth up to $50 million with several clients, including a healthcare management services organization, a manufacturer, and goods and apparel makers, the two people familiar with the discussions told TechCrunch, echoing investor materials obtained by TechCrunch that expects an estimated annual run rate of about $75 million by the third quarter of this year. (Prentice’s presentation notes that these numbers reflect estimated annual value based on a contracted fee equal to 20% of savings achieved, not recognized revenue, and are “performance-based and subject to final implementation.”)

By its own account, Prentis says its Hive-32B model outperforms competitors, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, in two computer usage metrics: WindowsAgentArena, which measures end-to-end task completion on real Windows applications; and ScreenSpot-v2, which tests the form’s ability to locate the appropriate control on the screen.

In its presentation, the company says its superiority comes from operating a much smaller and cheaper model. In fact, it claims the cost per task is about 10 times lower than frontier APIs, saying they are more economical to deploy across daily workflows. TechCrunch has not independently verified the company’s benchmark results.

The startup is betting that automating everyday office tasks will soon overtake programming as the biggest use case for AI, but it’s a crowded market. Mira Murati’s companies Anthropic, Open AI and Thinking Machines are also developing AI agents for computer use, one of the sources said. Anthropic has also captured talent in this category directly, purchasing Seattle computer startup Vercept earlier this year, onboarding its founders and shutting down its product.

Prentis did not 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 degree in biomedical engineering from the University of Oxford.

He founded Titan in 2014 after leaving a PhD program in artificial intelligence at Cambridge, where he was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Das described Titan as a deliberate throwback to the old holding company model similar to Berkshire Hathaway, which is funded through its own exits rather than external limited partners.

Other companies launched and run by Titan include AI-powered virtual care company 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. CirrusDx acquired disease prediction company Dascena, founded by Titan, in 2022.

Prentis is a side project of sorts for its co-founders. Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner, said last month that he would step down from Microsoft’s board after nearly a decade to move into “founder mode” at Manas AI, an AI startup for drug discovery that he also supports. He was an early investor in OpenAI and co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleiman before Microsoft absorbed most of that team in 2024.

Pincus, the founder of Zynga, now runs the investment firm Revenant Capital with Hoffman as a senior advisor, 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.