Prentis, an AI research lab co-founded by Ritankar Das, Reid Hoffman and Marc Pincus, is reportedly discussing a $100 million funding round at a $1 billion valuation. The company is developing AI agents that can operate computers to automate routine office work, a potentially significant market as businesses seek to reduce administrative workloads.

Launched in April, Prentis says it has contracts worth up to $50 million and projects a $75 million annualised run rate by the third quarter, though these figures are performance-dependent and not recognised revenue. Its Hive-32B model is claimed to outperform larger rivals on computer-use benchmarks while costing about ten times less per task, but TechCrunch has not independently verified those results; the company faces competition from Anthropic, OpenAI and Thinking Machines.