Prime Intellect, a burgeoning startup offering computational power and tailored software tools for businesses to create AI agents, has successfully secured a $130 million Series A funding round, achieving a valuation of $1 billion.

This substantial funding round was spearheaded by Radical Ventures, with contributions from Nvidia Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Iconiq, and a variety of angel investors who are founders of prominent companies, such as Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Aaron Levie (Box), Winston Weinberg (Harvey), Jeff Wang (Cognition), and Brendan Foody (Mercor).

Established in 2024, Prime Intellect aims to empower organizations to train their own agentic systems independently of advanced AI labs. Although this objective would have seemed daunting a few years back, the advent of reinforcement learning methods, which reward successful completion of tasks while penalizing mistakes, enables businesses to act as their “own AI lab” by honing models for particular business functions.

Despite the possibility of bypassing centralized AI laboratories, the foundational infrastructure remains exceedingly intricate, leaving many organizations without the required expertise to piece together a production-ready system.

This is precisely where Prime Intellect steps in.

The startup has created what it dubs a “full stack” for AI agent development, encompassing compute access, a reinforcement learning framework, and assessment tools.

Prime Intellect’s platform operates as a marketplace, allowing clients to select and utilize only the necessary tools they require without being bound to a comprehensive system.

“They’ve integrated this in such a manner that they’re pioneering at the cutting edge in a cost-effective way,” remarked David Katz, a partner at Radical Ventures. He noted that while competitors may provide isolated components, Prime Intellect offers the functionality of a premier AI lab as a “one-stop shop” for development.

The startup’s methodology has garnered customers like Ramp, Zapier, and Flapping Airplanes, who compensate the startup for a hosted version of its offerings. This swift adoption has catapulted the company to an annual revenue run rate of $100 million.

This expansion is driven by concrete results. For instance, Ramp utilized Prime Intellect to create an agent that assisted the fintech in deriving answers from spreadsheets. “The outcome surpassed the frontier models in accuracy while operating at higher speeds and a fraction of the cost,” stated Ramp’s co-founder and co-CEO Karim Atiyeh.

Another pivotal element fueling Prime Intellect’s growth is the newfound awareness among companies that building upon leading-edge labs entails several risks.

Businesses are increasingly hesitant to share their proprietary information with OpenAI and Anthropic due to potential data control loss. They also express concerns about relying on models that can be abruptly disabled, as demonstrated with Anthropic’s Fable last month.

“How can I be certain that I’m not partnering with a company aiming to replace me and generalize my work,” Katz commented. “All of these factors are prompting people to consider, ‘How do I secure my own enterprise intelligence and mitigate these risks’.”

Co-founder and CEO Vincent Weisser of Prime Intellect believes that enterprises are eager to shift away from proprietary frontier models, and his company supplies the necessary infrastructure to facilitate this transition.

“It shouldn’t merely be a handful of tech enthusiasts in a glass tower in San Francisco with the ability to train AI models,” he expressed to TechCrunch. “It should encompass every enterprise, every nation state.”

U.S. insurance firm AssuranceAmerica has announced a data breach involving the personal details and driver’s license numbers of 6.9 million individuals, marking it as the most significant known leak of Americans’ driver’s license data this year.

Established in 1998, AssuranceAmerica offers car and rental insurance to clients in over a dozen U.S. states. Being a major insurance entity, the company manages extensive data concerning potential insurance clients and vehicle operators, encompassing their personal details and data regarding their state-issued driver’s licenses. In the possession of a malicious individual, a driver’s license number could facilitate fraud and impersonation.

In a data breach notification dispatched to clients and observed by TechCrunch, AssuranceAmerica revealed that it detected unauthorized access in its computer systems on March 17. The company completed its investigation on June 15, discovering that the intruders had extracted clients’ names, contact details, and driver’s license numbers. 

The breach notification stated that the hackers also accessed data concerning clients’ auto insurance policies and accounts, as well as information about their drivers and vehicles, and particulars about client claims. 

The company did not elaborate on what other types of personal data were compromised.

AssuranceAmerica did not disclose the exact reason for the breach but mentioned that the hackers “targeted one of the Company’s employees” and that the company subsequently “disabled compromised credentials.” It remains unclear how those credentials were acquired, but past incidents involving the theft of employee credentials have been associated with password-stealing malware or the use of compromised software.

TechCrunch sent inquiries regarding the situation to AssuranceAmerica CEO Joe Skruck and founder Guy Millner, including whether the company had engaged with the hackers or provided a ransom. Neither answered.

According to a data breach report filed with the Indiana attorney general’s office, AssuranceAmerica noted the breach as affecting 6.99 million individuals, with notification letters scheduled for distribution on July 10.

An alternate copy of AssuranceAmerica’s data breach notification, provided by the Maine attorney general’s office at TechCrunch’s request, also indicates the number of individuals affected is 6.99 million. (Maine’s data breach portal is currently offline and under review following a fraudulent breach disclosure published on its website last month.)

The occurrence at AssuranceAmerica coincides with a series of data breaches impacting driver’s licenses and other identity documents in recent months. In June, the Texas state government reported that hackers compromised data related to at least 3 million driver’s licenses and passport numbers during a breach affecting the state’s parks and wildlife division.

TechCrunch has previously covered numerous security flaws that collectively compromised millions of government-issued identity documents, including incidents involving a hotel check-in system, a money transfer application, a prison payphone provider, and a U.K. visa service. These data leaks arise as websites and apps increasingly require users to provide their identity documents to verify their legal age for access, amid a global initiative by governments to implement age-verification regulations.

As both established and emerging companies race to leverage AI, a number of AI startups report that their revenue is not just increasing but also accelerating rapidly, achieving milestones in shorter time frames.

The startups listed below have exhibited a trend of such flywheel growth. It’s important to note that the metrics these companies reference vary, even when they mention “ARR.” Some may define it as annualized recurring revenue (ARR) or contracted revenue from a paying client that has yet to be billed. Others may refer to annualized run-rate revenue, which estimates annual earnings by extrapolating from the revenue of the most recent month over 12 months. Additionally, some refer to “committed ARR,” which includes contracts signed by customers who are yet to be onboarded. In Gusto’s case, it reported its actual trailing revenue for the last 12 months.

Nonetheless, each of these startups, presented in reverse order based on when their ARR growth became known, indicates that their revenue growth is picking up speed, however that may be defined. There are certainly many more rapidly growing AI startups than those mentioned here, but we are focusing this list on companies achieving revenue milestones at increasingly swift rates.

Mercor: On Monday, co-founder and CEO Brendan Foody announced that the company has surpassed $2 billion in gross annualized revenue as of June — a mere four months after reaching the $1 billion benchmark. The firm, which employs domain specialists to develop and enhance AI models, stated that it attained a $500 million run rate in September.

Anthropic: This model maker has recently seen its revenue grow at such an unprecedented pace that it has captivated the entire AI industry. In late May, Anthropic revealed that it exceeded a $47 billion revenue run rate, a noteworthy achievement that came less than two months after announcing its revenue run rate had surpassed $30 billion. The company stated it reached a $9 billion revenue run rate by late 2025, up from a previously reported $4 billion in July 2025.

Sierra: After achieving its first $100 million in ARR within seven quarters, Sierra — which creates AI agents for enterprise customer service — announced in late May that it took just two additional quarters to add another $100 million, according to co-founder and CEO Bret Taylor.

Glean: In May, Glean declared that it surpassed $300 million in ARR. While it required the seven-year-old enterprise AI startup nine months to increase its ARR from $100 million to $200 million, the company claims it only took six months to boost that figure from $200 million to $300 million.

Gusto: The 14-year-old HR tech firm revealed in May that its revenue has accelerated every quarter for the past five. Valued at $9.3 billion in early 2022, the company also disclosed that it has exceeded $1 billion in trailing 12-month revenue. Gusto’s revenue growth demonstrates that AI-native companies aren’t the only ones experiencing significant top-line growth through the use of this technology.

Clio: This 18-year-old provider of legal practice management software saw a dramatic increase in revenue after integrating AI into its services in 2023. The company reached $200 million in ARR by mid-2024, doubled that amount by the end of last year, and recently announced that its ARR has hit $500 million.