Prime Intellect, a startup that provides computing power and specialized software tools that help companies build AI agents, has raised a $130 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation.
The massive round was led by Radical Ventures, with participation from Nvidia Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Iconiq, and a long list of angel investors who are founders of notable companies, including Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Aaron Levie (Box), Winston Weinberg (Harvey), Jeff Wang (Cognition), and Brendan Foody (Mercor).
Founded in 2024, Prime Intellect’s goal is to give organizations capabilities to train their own agentic systems without relying on frontier AI labs. While this mission would have been hard to achieve just a few years ago, the rise of reinforcement learning techniques, which iteratively reward successful task completion and penalizes errors, can allow companies to become their “own AI lab” by refining models for specific business tasks.
Although it is now possible to bypass closed AI labs, the underlying infrastructure remains so complex that most companies lack the expertise to assemble these pieces into a production-ready system.
That’s where Prime Intellect comes in.
The startup has developed what it calls a “full stack” for AI agent development, which includes compute access, a reinforcement learning framework, and evaluation tools.
Prime Intellect’s platform functions like a marketplace, providing modular access so customers can pick and choose the specific tools they need without being locked into an all-or-nothing system.
“They’ve stitched this together and built it in such a way that they’re operating at the frontier in a way that’s affordable,” said David Katz, a partner at Radical Ventures. He added that while others offer bits and pieces, Prime Intellect is unique in providing the capabilities of a top-tier AI lab as a “one-stop shop” for development.
The startup’s approach has attracted customers like Ramp, Zapier, and Flapping Airplanes, who pay the startup for a hosted version of its tools. This rapid adoption has propelled the company to an annualized revenue run rate of $100 million.
This growth is driven by the tangible results. For example, Ramp used Prime Intellect to build an agent that helped the fintech find answers inside spreadsheets. “The result beat the frontier models on accuracy while running at faster speeds and a fraction of the cost,” Ramp’s co-founder and co-CEO Karim Atiyeh said in a statement.
Another key factor driving Prime Intellect’s growth is the recent realization by companies that building on top of frontier labs carries a number of risks.
Companies increasingly don’t want to provide their proprietary information to OpenAI and Anthropic due to the risk of losing control over their data. They are also wary of depending on models that can be suddenly turned off, as happened with Anthropic’s Fable last month.
“How do I know that I’m not working with a company that is going to try to replace me and generalize to what I’m doing,” Katz said. “All of these things are causing people to think, ‘How do I own my own enterprise intelligence and not have these risks’.”
Prime Intellect co-founder and CEO Vincent Weisser believes enterprises are looking to move away from closed source frontier models, and his company provides the infrastructure to make that transition possible.
“It shouldn’t just be a few nerds in a glass tower in San Francisco that have the capability to train AI models,” he told TechCrunch. “It should be every enterprise, every nation state.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.