BrideA new artificial intelligence research lab focused on computer usage models, founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das and tech heavyweights Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
Launched in April, Prentis trains models to learn how office workers navigate common workflows across documents and systems, with the goal of creating AI agents that can control computers to automate those tasks.
Prentis will apparently develop agents tailored to the needs of these customers, such as managing insurance claims and automating customs duty refund exemptions without the need for a human to chase down paperwork.
The startup has already signed contracts worth up to $50 million with multiple clients, including a healthcare management services organization, a manufacturer, and product and apparel makers, the two people with knowledge of the discussions tell TechCrunch. That echoes investor materials obtained by TechCrunch that forecast an estimated annual run rate of $75 million by the third quarter of this year. (Prentis’ pitch deck notes that these figures reflect estimated annualized value based on a contractual fee equal to 20% of realized savings, unrecognized revenue and are “performance dependent and subject to final execution.”)
By its own account, Prentis says its Hive-32B model outperforms rivals such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 in two PC usage benchmarks: WindowsAgentArena, which measures end-to-end task completion in real Windows applications, and ScreenSpot’s ability to check the av2 display model.
In its pitch deck, the company argues that its advantage comes from operating a much smaller, cheaper model. In fact, it claims about 10x lower cost per task than frontier APIs, saying it’s more cost-effective to deploy in everyday workflows. TechCrunch has not independently verified the company’s reporting results.
The startup is betting that automating everyday office tasks will soon overtake coding as the biggest use case for artificial intelligence, but it’s a crowded market. Anthropic, Open AI and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab are also working on developing artificial intelligence agents for computer use, one of the sources said. Anthropic has also acquired talent in the category directly – it bought Seattle computing startup Vercept earlier this year, folding its founders and shutting down its product.
Prentis did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Ritankar Das, CEO of Prentis, is also the founder of Titan, a holding company that builds and operates artificial intelligence companies. Das, now 31, was the youngest medalist at UC Berkeley more than a centurygraduating at 18 with a double major in industrial and chemical biology before gaining a master’s degree in biomedical engineering at Oxford.
He founded Titan in 2014 after dropping out of an AI PhD program at Cambridge, where he was a Gates Cambridge Fellow. Das described Titan as a deliberate return to an old-fashioned holding company model like Berkshire Hathaway, one 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 created $100 million seed last year and Forta Health, an autism care startup he created 55 million dollars led by Insight Partners in 2024. Titan-founded disease prediction company Dascena was acquired by CirrusDx in 2022.
Prentis is a side project for his other two co-founders. Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner, said last month he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board after nearly a decade to move into “founder mode” at Manas AI, an artificial intelligence drug discovery startup he also backs. He was an early investor in OpenAI and co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman before Microsoft absorbed most of that team in 2024.
Pincus, the founder of Zynga, now runs the investment firm Reinvent Capital with Hoffman as a senior adviser and published the memoir, “Life at Game Speed,” last month.
Prentis has already hired more than 25 employees, including researchers who previously worked at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Tencent and Alibaba. website.
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