Apprenticea new AI research lab focused on computing usage patterns co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das and tech heavyweights Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
Launched in April, Prentis trains models to learn how office workers manage routine workflows across documents and systems, with the goal of creating AI agents that can control computers to automate these tasks.
Prentis will apparently develop agents tailored to the needs of these customers, such as processing insurance claims and automating customs duty refund exceptions without needing a human to track down paperwork.
The startup has already signed deals worth up to $50 million with several clients, including a healthcare management services organization, a manufacturer, and goods and apparel makers, the two people familiar with the discussions told TechCrunch. This echoes investor documents obtained by TechCrunch that predict an estimated annualized run rate of $75 million by the third quarter of this year. (The Prentis pitch deck notes that these figures reflect an estimated annualized value based on a contract fee equal to 20% of realized savings, not recognized revenue, and are “performance dependent and subject to final execution.”)
By its own account, Prentis claims that its Hive-32B model outperforms competitors, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, on two computing usage benchmarks: WindowsAgentArena, which measures end-to-end task completion on real Windows applications, and ScreenSpot-v2, which tests a model’s ability to locate the correct control on the screen.
In its pitch deck, the company says its advantage comes from using a much smaller and cheaper model. In fact, it claims a cost per task that’s about 10 times lower than frontier APIs, claiming it’s more economical to deploy on everyday workflows. TechCrunch has not independently verified the company’s benchmark results.
The startup is betting that automating everyday office tasks will soon overtake coding as the biggest use case for AI, but it’s a crowded market. Anthropic, Open AI and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab are also working to develop AI agents for computing use, one of the sources said. Anthropic has also directly acquired talent in this category: it bought Vercept, a Seattle IT start-up. earlier this yearfolding its founders and discontinuing its product.
Prentis did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Ritankar Das, CEO of Prentis, is also the founder of Titan, a holding company that creates and operates AI companies. Das, now 31, was UC Berkeley’s youngest varsity medalist in more than a centurygraduated at 18 with a double major in bioengineering and chemical biology before obtaining a master’s degree in biomedical engineering at Oxford.
He founded Titan in 2014 after dropping out of an AI PhD program at Cambridge, where he had been a Gates Cambridge Fellow. Das described Titan as an intentional return to an old-style holding company model like Berkshire Hathaway, funded by its own exits rather than outside sponsors.
Other companies launched and operated by Titan include AI-powered virtual care provider Tala Health, which raised a $100 Million Seed last year, and Forta Health, an autism care startup that raised $55 million led by Insight Partners in 2024. Dascena, a disease prediction company founded by Titan, was acquired by CirrusDx in 2022.
Prentis is a sort of side project for its two other co-founders. Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock, said last month that he was resign from the Microsoft board after nearly a decade spent in “founder mode” on Manas AI, an AI drug discovery startup he also backs; he was an early investor in OpenAI and co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman before Microsoft absorbed most of that team in 2024.
Pincus, the founder of Zynga, now runs the investment firm Reinvent Capital with Hoffman as a senior advisor, and published a memoir titled “Life at the Speed of Gaming” last month.
Prentis has already hired more than 25 employees, including researchers who previously worked at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Tencent and Alibaba, according to its website.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch. Before joining TechCrunch, she wrote about venture capital for PitchBook and Venture Capital Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned her CFA designation.
You can contact or check Marina’s outreach by sending an email marina.temkin@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at +1 347-683-3909 on Signal.
