What is Prentis? Reid Hoffman-backed AI startup in talks to raise $100 million funding: Report
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga founder Mark Pincus-backed AI startup Prentis is looking to raise fresh funding, according to a TechCrunch report. The AI
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga founder Mark Pincus-backed AI startup Prentis is looking to raise fresh funding, according to a TechCrunch report. The AI startup, which was launched in April this year, is reportedly in talks to raise $100 million at a valuation of $1 billion. What is Prentis AI? Prentis was founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das along with Hoffman and Pincus. The company is reportedly training AI models to learn how office workers interact with documents, software and enterprise systems. The goal of Prentis is to build AI agents that can control computers to automate these tasks. The AI startup is also reportedly developing AI agents for enterprise use cases such as processing insurance claims, handling customs duty refund exceptions and other repetitive office tasks that typically require a human to navigate multiple applications and documents.
Prentis has already signed contracts worth up to $50 million with customers across the healthcare, manufacturing and consumer goods sectors. The report also cites investor materials claiming that the startup expects to reach an annualised revenue run rate of $75 million by the third quarter of this year. How is Prentis placed in the AI market? According to Prentis' investor deck, the company claims that its in-house Hive-32B AI model outperforms OpenAI's GPT-5.4 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 on WindowsAgentArena and ScreenSpot-v2, two benchmarks that measure how effectively AI models can use computers and interact with on-screen interfaces. The company argues that its advantage comes from running a much smaller and cheaper model.
Prentis claims its model has almost 10 times lower cost per task than the APIs of frontier AI models. The company also says it is more economical to deploy across everyday workflows. Prentis is betting that AI capable of operating computers will become one of the biggest enterprise AI use cases after coding assistants. However, the company will face competition from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, all of which are developing similar AI agents. According to its website, Prentis has already hired more than 25 employees, including former researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Tencent and Alibaba. Who is behind Prentis?
Prentis founder Ritankar Das was also behind the AI holding company Titan. Das graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, at the age of 18 before later studying biomedical engineering at Oxford. He then founded Titan after leaving a PhD programme at the University of Cambridge. Titan has previously launched several AI-focused companies, including healthcare startups Tala Health and Forta Health, while disease prediction startup Dascena was acquired by CirrusDx in 2022.
The BriefWire