Prime Intellect raises $130M Series A to help enterprises build their own AI agents

Prime Intellect, a startup that offers computing power and specialized software to help companies build AI agents, has secured $130 million in Series A funding, reaching a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by Radical Ventures, with participation from Nvidia Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Iconiq, and angel investors including Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity), Aaron Levie (Box), Winston Weinberg (Harvey), Jeff Wang (Cognition), and Brendan Foody (Mercor).

Founded in 2024, Prime Intellect aims to enable organizations to train their own agentic AI systems without relying on frontier AI labs. Advances in reinforcement learning, which uses rewards and penalties to refine models, now make this feasible. However, the underlying infrastructure remains complex, and Prime Intellect provides a “full-stack” platform that includes compute access, a reinforcement learning framework, and evaluation tools. The platform is designed as a marketplace, allowing customers to pick and choose modular components without vendor lock-in.

“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 emphasized that Prime Intellect offers a one-stop shop for capabilities typically found only in top-tier AI labs.

The startup has already attracted customers like Ramp, Zapier, and Flapping Airplanes, and its annualized revenue run rate has reached $100 million. For example, Ramp used Prime Intellect to build an agent that finds answers in spreadsheets, outperforming frontier models in accuracy while running faster and at lower cost.

Prime Intellect's growth is also fueled by companies' growing concerns about relying on closed AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Businesses are reluctant to share proprietary data and worry about dependence on models that could be suddenly discontinued—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.

Prime Intellect co-founder and CEO Vincent Weisser believes enterprises want to own their own intelligence and avoid these risks. “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.”