The $1 Billion Startup Teaching AI to Do Your Desk Job

Key points

• Prentis, an AI startup launched in April 2025, is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation.
• The company has signed contracts worth up to $50 million with customers in healthcare, manufacturing and retail.
• Its pitch deck projects an annualised revenue run rate of $75 million by Q3 2025, though those figures are performance-dependent, not recognised revenue.
• Prentis claims its Hive-32B model beats OpenAI's GPT-5.4 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 on two computer-use benchmarks, though TechCrunch, which first reported the story, has not independently verified those results.
• Co-founders include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Zynga founder Marc Pincus alongside CEO Ritankar Das, 31.

A four-month-old AI startup wants to sit at your desk and do the boring bits of your job. Prentis, first reported by TechCrunch, is training what it calls computer-use models, a type of AI that can look at a screen, click buttons and fill in forms the same way a person would, only faster and without complaining.

What does Prentis actually do?

It builds AI agents, meaning software that carries out multi-step tasks on its own, aimed at white-collar workflows. Think processing an insurance claim, chasing a customs duty refund, or pulling data from three different systems without a human hunting through paperwork.

The startup charges customers a fee equal to 20 percent of whatever savings the AI delivers. No savings, no bill. That model has already produced contracts worth up to $50 million with clients in healthcare management, manufacturing, and clothing retail, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The pitch deck forecasts a $75 million annualised run rate by the third quarter of this year. The company's own small print warns those are estimated figures based on contracted fees, not money already in the bank, and depend on the AI actually performing.

Who is behind it, and where is the money coming from?

CEO Ritankar Das, 31, graduated UC Berkeley at 18 with a double major in bioengineering and chemical biology, earned a master's at Oxford and dropped out of a Cambridge AI PhD programme to found Titan, a holding company that builds AI businesses using profits from its own exits rather than outside investors.

Titan's other companies include Tala Health, a virtual care provider that raised a $100 million seed round in 2024, and Forta Health, an autism-care startup that raised $55 million from Insight Partners the same year.

Hoffman and Pincus are co-founders, though both treat Prentis as a side project. Hoffman recently stepped down from Microsoft's board to focus on Manas AI, a drug-discovery startup. Pincus runs the investment firm Reinvent Capital.

Should office workers be worried?

Possibly, but not yet. The market is crowded. Anthropic, OpenAI and Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab are all building competing computer-use agents. Anthropic bought a Seattle startup called Vercept earlier this year specifically to accelerate that work.

Prentis claims its Hive-32B model, a 32-billion-parameter AI (the number roughly indicates how much information the model has learned), beats both OpenAI's GPT-5.4 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 on two standard tests for computer use. It also claims its model costs about ten times less per task than those rivals. Neither claim has been verified independently.

Survivorship bias is real here. Prentis is four months old, its revenue figures are projections, and the workers whose tasks it targets are the same ones who were promised automation a decade ago by robotic process automation tools that never quite delivered.

The one honest takeaway: if your job involves repeating the same clicks across the same software systems every day, watch this space. The tools are getting good enough to matter. Start documenting exactly what you do and why, because the humans who understand a workflow deeply will be the ones who manage the AI doing it.