Prentiss, a brand new AI lab centered on computational fashions co-founded by serial entrepreneur Retankar Das and tech executives Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, is in talks to boost $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, two folks accustomed to the discussions mentioned.
Based in April, Prentis trains fashions that find out how workplace employees navigate each day workflows throughout paperwork and methods, with the aim of constructing AI brokers that may management computer systems to automate these duties.
Prentice is ostensibly creating an company that may meet the wants of those clients with out the necessity for people to hunt for paperwork, reminiscent of automating insurance coverage declare processing and customs refund exceptions.
The startup already has contracts price as much as $50 million with a number of clients, together with healthcare administration providers organizations, producers, and items and clothes producers, two folks accustomed to the discussions informed newsweblatest. That is in step with investor supplies obtained by newsweblatest that undertaking an estimated annual run charge of $75 million by the third quarter of this 12 months. (Prentice’s proposal paperwork say these numbers mirror an estimated annualized quantity primarily based on a contract payment equal to twenty% of realized financial savings, not income acknowledged, and are “depending on efficiency and topic to final enforcement.”)
Based on Prentis’ personal accounts, its Hive-32B mannequin outperforms competing merchandise reminiscent of OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 on two computational benchmarks: WindowsAgentArena, which measures end-to-end job completion in actual Home windows functions, and ScreenSpot-v2, which exams the mannequin’s skill to seek out applicable on-screen controls.
The corporate claims in its pitch deck that its benefit lies in working a a lot smaller and cheaper mannequin. In truth, they declare that the fee per job is roughly 10 occasions decrease than the Frontier API, making it extra economical to deploy all through your each day workflow. newsweblatest has not independently verified the corporate’s benchmark outcomes.
The startup is betting that automation of on a regular basis workplace duties will quickly surpass coding as the most important use case for AI, however the market is crowded. Anthropic, Open AI and Mira Murati’s Pondering Machines Lab are additionally engaged on creating AI brokers for computer systems, one of many folks mentioned. Anthropic has additionally acquired expertise straight within the subject, buying Seattle computing startup Vercept earlier this 12 months, bringing in its founders and shutting down the product.
Prentice didn’t reply to newsweblatest’s request for remark.
Prentis CEO Ritankar Das can be the founding father of Titan, a holding firm that builds and operates AI corporations. Das, now 31, is UC Berkeley’s youngest faculty medalist in additional than a century, graduating with a double main in bioengineering and chemical biology on the age of 18 after which incomes a grasp’s diploma in biomedical engineering from Oxford.
He based Titan in 2014 after dropping out of the AI PhD program at Cambridge College as a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Das described Titan as a deliberate throwback to the old-school holding firm mannequin of corporations like Berkshire Hathaway, which is funded by means of its personal exits somewhat than exterior restricted companions.
Different companies launched and operated by Titan embrace Tala Well being, an AI-powered digital care supplier that raised $100 million in a seed spherical final 12 months, and Forta Well being, an autism care startup that raised $55 million in 2024 led by Perception Companions. Dascena, a illness prediction firm based by Titan, was acquired by CirrusDx in 2022.
Prentis is a aspect undertaking of kinds with the opposite two co-founders. Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and accomplice at Greylock, introduced final month that he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board after almost a decade to enter “founder mode” at Manas AI, an AI drug discovery startup he additionally backs. He was an early investor in OpenAI and co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman earlier than Microsoft absorbed a lot of the staff in 2024.
Mr. Pincus, the Zynga founder, now runs the funding agency Reinvent Capital, with Mr. Hoffman as a senior advisor, and final month revealed a memoir, “Life on the Velocity of Play.”
Based on the corporate’s web site, Prentiss already employs greater than 25 folks, together with researchers who beforehand labored at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Tencent and Alibaba.
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