How much is an AI agent that can use your mouse and keyboard worth? Prentis is about to find out. The three-month-old startup, backed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga founder Mark Pincus, is raising $100 million at a billion-dollar valuation.
The pitch is deceptively simple: instead of teaching AI to write code or generate images, train it to do the mundane work that office employees spend hours on each day. Processing insurance claims. Filing customs paperwork. Navigating enterprise software. The kind of tasks that consume billions of paid labor hours annually.
Prentis claims its approach works. The company says its model beats OpenAI and Anthropic on two industry benchmarks while running at a tenth of the cost. It has already signed customers worth up to $50 million in contract value across healthcare, manufacturing and retail.
The company is led by Ritankar Das, who founded holding company Titan at 19 after dropping out of a Cambridge AI PhD. Titan operates like a modern Berkshire Hathaway for AI businesses. Prentis is its latest venture, joining health AI startups Tala Health and Forta Health.
Competition is fierce. Anthropic, OpenAI and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab are all chasing the same computer-use vision. But Prentis argues that smaller, cheaper models optimized for specific workflows will win where general-purpose systems struggle.
