A new startup called Prentis is entering the crowded field of AI that can use a computer like a human, and it’s doing so with a serious pedigree and a very specific pitch: forget coding assistants, the real money is in automating the soul-crushing paperwork of insurance claims and customs forms.
The company, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das alongside tech luminaries Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, sources told TechCrunch. That’s a hefty price tag for a company that only launched in April. But Prentis is already waving around signed contracts worth up to $50 million with a healthcare service organization and several manufacturers, and its investor deck projects a $75 million annualized run rate by Q3. Crucially, those figures are based on a fee equal to 20% of savings realized—it’s performance-dependent revenue, not cash in the bank yet.
What’s interesting is Prentis’s technical bet. They claim their smaller, cheaper Hive-32B model beats frontier giants like OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 on specific computer-use benchmarks like WindowsAgentArena and ScreenSpot-v2. They argue this efficiency makes them roughly 10 times cheaper per task than using a massive API, which is the kind of economics you’d need to make automating routine office workflows viable at scale. It’s a direct shot across the bow of well-funded rivals like Anthropic, which just acquired the computer-use startup Vercept, and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab.
The team behind it is a study in contrasts. Das, 31, was UC Berkeley’s youngest University Medalist in over a century and dropped out of a Cambridge AI PhD to found Titan, a holding company modeled on Berkshire Hathaway that builds and operates AI businesses. For Hoffman, currently in ‘founder mode’ on an AI drug-discovery startup, and Pincus, fresh off publishing a memoir, Prentis seems more like a side bet from two people who can afford to make a lot of them. Whether this team can carve out a defensible position in a market that’s already attracting the heaviest of heavyweights is the billion-dollar question.
