What is Prentis? Reid Hoffman-backed AI startup in talks to raise $100 million funding: Report
According to a TechCrunch report, artificial intelligence startup Prentis, backed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga founder Mark Pincus, plans to raise new financing. The artificial intelligence startup, which launched in April this year, is reportedly in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation.
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. Prentis’ goal is to create artificial intelligence 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 duty refund exclusions, and other repetitive office tasks that often require a human to navigate multiple applications and documents.
Prentis has already signed contracts worth up to $50 million with customers in the healthcare, manufacturing and consumer goods industries. The report also cites investor materials claiming that the startup expects to reach an annual revenue rate of $75 million by the third quarter of this year.
How is Prentis positioned in the artificial intelligence market?
According to Prentis’ investor group, 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; These are 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 operating a much smaller and cheaper model. Prentis claims that its model has almost 10 times lower cost per task compared to APIs of advanced AI models. The company also says it is more economical to distribute in daily workflows.
Prentis believes AI that can run computers will become one of the biggest enterprise AI use cases after coding assistants. But the company will face competition from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Laboratory, all of which are developing similar AI agents.
According to its website, Prentis has 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 AI holding company Titan. Das graduated from the University of California at Berkeley at the age of 18 and later studied biomedical engineering at Oxford. He later founded Titan after leaving his PhD program at Cambridge University.
Titan has previously founded several AI-focused companies, including healthcare startups Tala Health and Forta Health. Disease prediction startup Dascena was acquired by CirrusDx in 2022.
Hoffman, meanwhile, remains one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent AI investors, having previously backed OpenAI and as a co-founder of Inflection AI. Earlier this year, he also resigned from Microsoft’s board of directors to focus on artificial intelligence startup Manas AI.
