Prentis AI Lab seeks $100 million funding at $1 billion valuation

Prentis, an artificial‑intelligence research lab launched in April 2026, is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation. The company was co‑founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das, LinkedIn co‑founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga founder Marc Pincus. Prentis is training “computer‑use” models that learn how office workers navigate routine workflows across documents and systems, with the aim of building AI agents that can control computers to automate tasks such as handling insurance claims or customs‑duty refunds. Its Hive‑32B model claims to outperform rivals including OpenAI’s GPT‑5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 on benchmarks WindowsAgentArena and ScreenSpot‑v2, while operating at roughly one‑tenth the cost per task of leading APIs. The startup has already secured contracts worth up to $50 million with customers in healthcare, manufacturing and clothing, and projects a $75 million annualized run rate by Q3 2026. TechCrunch has not independently verified the benchmark results. The funding round would support further development of AI agents for routine office automation, a market that Prentis says is becoming larger than traditional coding‑focused AI use cases.