A new AI lab called Prentis is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, aiming to make the mundane parts of office work disappear. The company, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das alongside LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Zynga’s Marc Pincus, is building models that can watch how people work and then just do it for them—navigating documents, clicking buttons, and hunting down the paperwork for an insurance claim without human intervention. Two sources familiar with the discussions tell TechCrunch the startup already has contracts worth up to $50 million with customers in healthcare and manufacturing, and investor materials project a $75 million annualized run rate by Q3.
Das’s pitch is that bigger isn’t better. Prentis claims its Hive-32B model beats heavyweights like OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 on two computer-use benchmarks, all while costing roughly 10 times less per task. A smaller, cheaper model that actually outperforms on-screen navigation would be a genuine edge—if the numbers hold up. TechCrunch hasn’t verified the benchmark results, and the revenue figures in the deck are based on a fee equal to 20% of savings realized, not cash in the bank. That’s a performance-dependent promise, not a receipt.
Prentis is betting that automating everyday clerical work will soon be a bigger deal than coding assistants. It’s not a crazy bet, but it’s a crowded one. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines are all racing toward the same goal. Anthropic went shopping for talent, too, buying Seattle startup Vercept earlier this year and folding in its founders. The space is starting to feel like a gold rush for anything that can click a mouse reliably.
Das is a professional overachiever—UC Berkeley’s youngest University Medalist, Gates Cambridge Scholar, and the 31-year-old force behind holding company Titan, which runs on its own exits rather than outside money. For Hoffman and Pincus, Prentis is a side gig. Hoffman just left Microsoft’s board to go full “founder mode” on an AI drug-discovery startup, and Pincus is fresh off publishing a memoir. Prentis has quietly hired more than 25 researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta, and Tencent. The talent is real. Whether the economics and accuracy are, too, is the question that $100 million would help answer.
