Prime Intellect, a startup supplying computing power and specialized software for building AI agents, has secured $130 million in Series A funding at a $1 billion valuation. The substantial investment round was spearheaded by Radical Ventures, with backing from Nvidia Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Iconiq, and a roster of prominent angel investors including founders of notable companies such as Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Aaron Levie (Box), Winston Weinberg (Harvey), Jeff Wang (Cognition), and Brendan Foody (Mercor).

Launched in 2024, Prime Intellect aims to empower organizations to train their own AI agent systems without depending on frontier AI labs. This mission, which would have been challenging just a few years ago, is now feasible due to advances in reinforcement learning techniques. These methods iteratively reward successful task completion and penalize mistakes, allowing companies to become their "own AI lab" by refining models for specific business tasks. While bypassing closed AI labs is now possible, the underlying infrastructure remains so complex that most companies lack the expertise to assemble these components into a production-ready system.

This is where Prime Intellect steps in. The startup has developed what it calls a "full-stack" for AI agent development, offering compute access, a reinforcement learning framework, and evaluation tools. Its platform functions like a marketplace, providing modular access so customers can select specific tools without being locked into an all-or-nothing system. "They've stitched this together and built it in such a way that they're operating at the frontier in a way that's affordable," said David Katz, a partner at Radical Ventures. He noted that while others offer bits and pieces, Prime Intellect uniquely provides the capabilities of a top-tier AI lab as a "one-stop shop" for development.

The startup's approach has attracted customers like Ramp, Zapier, and Flapping Airplanes, who pay for a hosted version of its tools. This rapid adoption has propelled the company to an annualized revenue run rate of $100 million. The growth is driven by tangible results. For instance, Ramp used Prime Intellect to build an agent that helped the fintech find answers inside spreadsheets. "The result beat the frontier models on accuracy while running at faster speeds and a fraction of the cost," Ramp's co-founder and co-CEO Karim Atiyeh said in a statement.

Another key factor driving Prime Intellect's growth is the recent realization by companies that building on top of frontier labs carries significant risks. Companies increasingly want to avoid providing proprietary information to OpenAI and Anthropic due to concerns about losing control over their data. They also worry about depending on models that could be suddenly turned off, as happened with Anthropic's Fable last month. "How do I know that I'm not working with a company that is going to try to replace me and generalize to what I'm doing," Katz said. "All of these things are causing people to think, 'How do I own my own enterprise intelligence and not have these risks.'"

Prime Intellect co-founder and CEO Vincent Weisser believes enterprises are looking to move away from closed-source frontier models, and his company provides the infrastructure to make that transition possible. "It should be every enterprise, every nation state."