LinkedIn co-founder's AI start-up to raise funds at $1B valuation

Prentis, a new artificial intelligence (AI) research lab focused on computer use models, is in talks to raise $100 million at a valuation of $1 billion. The company was co-founded by Ritankar Das, Reid Hoffman, and Mark Pincus. Launched in April 2026, Prentis is training models to understand how office workers navigate routine workflows across documents and systems. The ultimate goal is to build AI agents that can control computers and automate these tasks. Prentis has already secured up to $50M in contracts. Prentis plans to develop agents tailored to specific customer needs, like handling insurance claims and automating customs duty refund exceptions without human intervention. The start-up has already signed contracts worth up to $50 million with various clients, including a healthcare management service organization, and goods and clothing manufacturers. These contracts suggest an estimated annualized run rate of $75 million by Q3 2026, according to investor materials obtained by TechCrunch. Prentis claims its Hive-32B model beats rivals like OpenAI's GPT-5.4 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 on two computer-use benchmarks: WindowsAgentArena and ScreenSpot-v2. The company says it runs a much smaller, cheaper model that costs about 10 times less per task than frontier APIs, making it more economical to deploy across everyday workflows. However, TechCrunch has not independently verified these benchmark results from Prentis. Ritankar Das, CEO of Prentis, is also the founder of Titan, a holding company that builds and operates AI companies. He was UC Berkeley's youngest University Medalist in over a century. Other businesses launched by Titan include Tala Health and Forta Health. Hoffman is the LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner who stepped down from Microsoft's board to focus on Manas AI, an AI drug-discovery start-up he's backing. Pincus is the Zynga founder who now runs Reinvent Capital.