Prentis, a new artificial intelligence research lab focused on computer usage models, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das and tech heavyweights Reid Hoffman and Marc 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 is training models to learn how office workers navigate routine workflows through documents and systems, with the goal of creating artificial intelligence agents that can control computers to automate those tasks.

Prentis will apparently develop agents tailored to the needs of these customers, such as handling insurance claims and automating customs duty refund exceptions without needing a human to dig through the paperwork.

The startup has already signed contracts worth up to $50 million with several clients, including a healthcare management services organization, a goods and apparel manufacturer, and manufacturers, the two people familiar with the discussions told TechCrunch, echoing investor materials obtained by TechCrunch that predict an estimated annualized run rate of $75 million for the third quarter of this year. (Prentis’ filing notes that those figures reflect an estimated annualized value based on a contracted fee equal to 20% of realized savings, not recognized revenue, and are “depending on performance and subject to final performance.”)

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

In its presentation, the company argues that its advantage comes from running a much smaller and cheaper model. In fact, it claims to have a cost per task about 10 times lower than state-of-the-art APIs, and says it’s cheaper to implement in everyday workflows. TechCrunch has not independently verified the company’s comparative results.

The startup is betting that automating everyday office tasks will soon overtake coding as the biggest use case for AI, but it’s a crowded market. Anthropic, Open AI and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines are also working on developing AI agents for computing use, one of the sources said. Anthropic has also been acquiring talent in the category directly: it bought Seattle startup Vercept earlier this year, brought on its founders and shuttered 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 artificial intelligence companies. Das, now 31, was UC Berkeley’s youngest undergraduate medalist in more than a century, graduating at age 18 with a double major in bioengineering and chemical biology before earning a master’s degree in biomedical engineering at Oxford.

He founded Titan in 2014 after leaving a PhD program in AI at Cambridge, where he had been a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Das has described Titan as an intentional throwback to an outdated holding company model like Berkshire Hathaway, one that is funded by its own exits rather than outside limited partners.

Other companies launched and operated by Titan include AI-powered virtual care provider 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. Disease prediction company Dascena, founded by Titan, was acquired by CirrusDx in 2022.

Prentis is something of a side project for its other two co-founders. Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn and a partner at Greylock, said last month he was leaving Microsoft’s board after nearly a decade to move into “founder mode” at Manas AI, an AI drug discovery startup he also backs; was an early investor in OpenAI and co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman before Microsoft absorbed most of that team in 2024.

Pincus, the founder of Zynga, now runs the investment firm Reinvent Capital with Hoffman as a senior adviser, and published a 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.