Prime Intellect, a startup founded in 2024 that supplies computing power and specialised software for building AI agents, has raised a $130 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by Radical Ventures, with backing from corporate investors including Nvidia Ventures, Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital, alongside prominent founder-angels such as Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas and Box's Aaron Levie. The company's aim is to let organisations train their own "agentic" systems without depending on frontier AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic, a shift made feasible by reinforcement learning techniques that refine models for specific business tasks.

Prime Intellect offers what it calls a "full stack" for agent development — combining compute access, a reinforcement learning framework and evaluation tools — arranged as a modular marketplace so customers pick only what they need. Paying customers including Ramp, Zapier and Flapping Airplanes have helped push the firm to an annualised revenue run rate of $100 million; Ramp said an agent it built to search spreadsheets beat frontier models on accuracy while running faster and more cheaply. Investors and the company frame demand around "AI sovereignty", citing firms' reluctance to hand proprietary data to closed labs and fears that models could be abruptly withdrawn, as reportedly happened with Anthropic's Fable. Chief executive Vincent Weisser argued that the ability to train AI models should extend to "every enterprise, every nation state", not just a few in San Francisco.