Prentis, a new AI lab focused on computer-use models, is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, TechCrunch reports. The company was launched in April by Ritankar Das with Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus as co-founders, and it is aiming at routine office work rather than software coding alone.
The startup is training models to understand how workers move through documents, applications, and internal systems. TechCrunch says Prentis has signed contracts worth up to $50 million with customers in areas including healthcare management, manufacturing, and apparel, though the figures are described as performance-dependent contract value rather than recognized revenue.
Prentis claims its Hive-32B model beats rivals on WindowsAgentArena and ScreenSpot-v2, benchmarks that test computer-task completion and screen-control recognition. TechCrunch notes that it has not independently verified those claims. The company’s larger bet is that agents able to operate ordinary business software could become a bigger market than coding assistants. That puts it in competition with work from Anthropic, OpenAI, Thinking Machines Lab, and other companies trying to make AI act reliably on a user’s computer.