Prentis AI Lab Targets $100 Million Raise for Computer Automation Agents
Prentis, a new AI research lab co-founded by Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus, and serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das, is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation. Launched in April, the startup focuses on training models that learn how office workers navigate routine workflows across documents and systems. The goal is to build AI agents that can control computers to automate tasks such as handling insurance claims and processing customs duty refunds without human intervention.
The company has already secured contracts worth up to $50 million with several customers across healthcare, manufacturing, and clothing sectors. Investor materials project an estimated $75 million annualized run rate by the third quarter of this year, though these figures reflect potential performance-based fees rather than recognized revenue. Prentis claims its Hive-32B model outperforms offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic on two computer-use benchmarks while operating at roughly one-tenth the cost per task of frontier APIs.
Prentis is betting that automating everyday office tasks will soon eclipse coding as AI's biggest use case, but it faces fierce competition. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab are all developing similar computer-use agents. Anthropic has already acquired computer-use startup Vercept earlier this year, signaling just how aggressively major players are pursuing this category.