Apprenticea brand new AI analysis lab targeted on laptop use fashions, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das and tech heavyweights Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, is in talks to lift $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, in accordance with two individuals aware of the discussions.
Launched in April, Prentis is coaching fashions to find out how workplace employees navigate routine workflows throughout paperwork and programs, with the objective of constructing AI brokers that may management computer systems to automate these duties.
Prentis will ostensibly develop brokers tailor-made to those clients’ wants, akin to dealing with insurance coverage claims and automating customs responsibility refund exceptions without having a human to search out paperwork.
The startup has already signed contracts price as much as $50 million with a number of clients, together with healthcare administration service group, a producer, and items and clothes producers, the 2 individuals aware of the discussions inform TechCrunch. This echoes investor supplies obtained by TechCrunch that predict an estimated $75 million annualized run price by the third quarter of this 12 months. (Prentis’ pitch deck notes these figures replicate estimated annualized worth based mostly on a contracted price equal to twenty% of financial savings realized, not acknowledged income, and are “performance-dependent and topic to closing execution.”)
By its personal account, Prentis says its Hive-32B mannequin outperforms rivals, together with OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, on two computer-use benchmarks: WindowsAgentArena, which measures end-to-end process completion on actual Home windows functions, and ScreenSpot-v2, which exams a mannequin’s skill to find the appropriate on-screen management.
In its pitch deck, the corporate argues its edge comes from working a a lot smaller, cheaper mannequin. Actually, it claims roughly 10 occasions decrease price per process than frontier APIs, saying it’s extra economical to deploy throughout on a regular basis workflows. TechCrunch hasn’t independently verified the corporate’s benchmark outcomes.
The startup is betting that automating on a regular basis workplace duties will quickly outpace coding as AI’s largest use case, nevertheless it’s a crowded market. Anthropic, Open AI, and Mira Murati’s Considering Machines Lab are additionally engaged on growing AI brokers for laptop use, one of many sources stated. Anthropic has additionally been buying expertise within the class straight — it purchased the Seattle computer-use startup Vercept earlier this yearfolding in its founders and shutting down its product.
Prentis didn’t reply to TechCrunch’s request for remark.
Ritankar Das, CEO of Prentis, can also be the founding father of Titan, a holding firm that builds and operates AI corporations. Das, now 31, was UC Berkeley’s youngest College Medalist in more than a centurygraduating at 18 with a double main in bioengineering and chemical biology earlier than incomes a grasp’s in biomedical engineering at Oxford.
He based Titan in 2014 after dropping out of an AI PhD program at Cambridge, the place he’d been a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Das has described Titan as an intentional throwback to an old school holding-company mannequin like Berkshire Hathaway, one which’s funded by its personal exits relatively than exterior restricted companions.
Different companies launched and operated by Titan embrace AI-powered digital care supplier Tala Well being, which raised a $100 million seed spherical final 12 months, and Forta Well being, an autism care startup that raised $55 million led by Perception Companions in 2024. Titan-founded illness prediction firm Dascena was acquired by CirrusDx in 2022.
Prentis is a facet venture of types for its two different co-founders. Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock associate, stated final month that he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board after practically a decade to go “founder mode” on Manas AI, an AI drug-discovery startup he’s additionally backing; he was an early OpenAI investor and co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman earlier than Microsoft absorbed most of that workforce in 2024.
Pincus, the Zynga founder, now runs the funding agency Reinvent Capital with Hoffman as a senior adviser, and revealed a memoir, “Life on the Pace of Play,” final month.
Prentis has already employed greater than 25 staff, together with researchers who beforehand labored at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Tencent, and Alibaba, in accordance with its website.
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