Prentis, a newly established AI research lab concentrating on computer usage models, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das alongside tech luminaries Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, is reportedly negotiating to secure $100 million at a valuation of $1 billion, as informed by two individuals acquainted with the talks.

Initiated in April, Prentis is developing models designed to understand how office employees manage routine workflows across various documents and systems, aiming to create AI agents capable of operating computers to automate these tasks.

Prentis will likely craft agents customized to meet the specific demands of its clients, such as processing insurance claims and automating exceptions for customs duty refunds without requiring human intervention to track down the necessary documentation.

The startup has already secured contracts totaling up to $50 million with various clients, including a healthcare management service organization, a manufacturer, and producers of goods and apparel, according to the two sources who spoke to TechCrunch. This aligns with investor documents obtained by TechCrunch, which project a potential annualized run rate of approximately $75 million by the end of the third quarter this year. (Prentis’ presentation indicates these figures represent projected annualized value based on a contracted fee amounting to 20% of realized savings, not recognized revenue, and are “performance-dependent and subject to final execution.”)

According to Prentis, its Hive-32B model surpasses competitors, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, on two computer usage metrics: WindowsAgentArena, which assesses end-to-end task completion on actual Windows applications, and ScreenSpot-v2, which evaluates a model’s capacity to identify the correct on-screen controls.

Within its pitch material, the company contends its advantage stems from utilizing a significantly smaller and more cost-effective model. Indeed, it asserts it incurs costs about 10 times lower per task than leading APIs, claiming it’s more viable to implement across routine workflows. TechCrunch has not independently verified the company’s benchmarking results.

The startup believes that the automation of day-to-day office tasks will soon exceed coding as the primary application of AI, although the competition is fierce. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab are also pursuing the development of AI agents for computer use, one of the sources noted. Anthropic has been actively recruiting talent in this field, having acquired the Seattle-based computer-use startup Vercept earlier this year, integrating its founders and discontinuing its product.

Prentis has not responded to TechCrunch’s request for a statement.

Ritankar Das, CEO of Prentis, is also the founder of Titan, a holding entity that builds and operates AI ventures. At 31, Das was the youngest University Medalist at UC Berkeley in over a century, graduating at the age of 18 with a double major in bioengineering and chemical biology before obtaining a master’s in biomedical engineering from Oxford.

He established Titan in 2014 after leaving an AI PhD program at Cambridge, where he had been a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Das has characterized Titan as a deliberate throwback to a classic holding-company model akin to Berkshire Hathaway, funded through its own exits rather than by external limited partners.

Other enterprises launched and managed by Titan include the AI-driven virtual care provider Tala Health, which secured a $100 million seed investment last year, and Forta Health, an autism care initiative that raised $55 million led by Insight Partners in 2024. Titan-founded disease prediction firm Dascena was acquired by CirrusDx in 2022.

Prentis serves as a side endeavor for its two other co-founders. Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a partner at Greylock, indicated last month that he would be stepping down from Microsoft’s board after nearly a decade to enter “founder mode” at Manas AI, an AI drug discovery startup he’s also supporting; he was an early investor in OpenAI and co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman before most of that team was integrated into Microsoft in 2024.

Pincus, the founder of Zynga, currently heads the investment firm Reinvent Capital, working with Hoffman as a senior adviser, and released a memoir, “Life at the Speed of Play,” last month.

Prentis has already recruited over 25 staff members, including researchers previously affiliated with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Tencent, and Alibaba, per its website.