A new artificial intelligence research lab named Prentis, which specializes in computer-use models, is reportedly in discussions to secure $100 million in funding at a valuation of $1 billion, according to two individuals familiar with the matter. The company was co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das, along with tech industry heavyweights Reid Hoffman and Marc Pincus. Launched in April, Prentis is developing models designed to learn how office workers navigate routine workflows across various documents and systems. The ultimate goal is to create AI agents capable of controlling computers to automate these tasks. Prentis plans to tailor its agents to specific customer needs, such as handling insurance claims and automating customs duty refund exceptions, eliminating the need for humans to manually search for paperwork. The company's pitch deck notes that these figures reflect estimated annualized value based on a contracted fee equal to 20% of savings realized, not recognized revenue, and are "performance-dependent and subject to final execution."

According to its own claims, Prentis's Hive-32B model outperforms competitors, including OpenAI's GPT-5.4 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, on two computer-use benchmarks: WindowsAgentArena, which measures end-to-end task completion on real Windows applications, and ScreenSpot-v2, which tests a model's ability to locate the correct on-screen control. In its pitch deck, the company argues that its advantage comes from running a much smaller, cheaper model. It claims roughly 10 times lower cost per task than frontier APIs, making it more economical to deploy across everyday workflows. The startup is betting that automating everyday office tasks will soon surpass coding as AI's biggest use case, but it faces a crowded market. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Mira Murati's Thinking Machines are also working on developing AI agents for computer use, according to one source. Anthropic has been acquiring talent in this category directly, buying the Seattle computer-use startup Vercept earlier this year, folding in its founders and shutting down its product.

Ritankar Das, CEO of Prentis, is also the founder of Titan, a holding company that builds and operates AI companies. Das, now 31, was UC Berkeley's youngest University Medalist in over a century, graduating at 18 with a double major in bioengineering and chemical biology before earning a master's in biomedical engineering at Oxford. He founded Titan in 2014 after dropping out of an AI PhD program at Cambridge, where he had been a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Das has described Titan as an intentional throwback to an old-fashioned holding-company model like Berkshire Hathaway, one that is funded by its own exits rather than outside limited partners. Other businesses 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. Titan-founded disease prediction company Dascena was acquired by CirrusDx in 2022.

Prentis is a side project of sorts for its two other co-founders. Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner, said last month that he was stepping down from Microsoft's board after nearly a decade to go "founder mode" on Manas AI, an AI drug-discovery startup he is also backing. He was an early OpenAI investor and co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman before Microsoft absorbed most of that team in 2024. Pincus, the Zynga founder, 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.