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

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 mega 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 aims to give organizations the capabilities to train their own agent systems without relying on frontier AI labs. While this task would have been difficult to achieve just a few years ago, the emergence of reinforcement learning techniques, which repeatedly reward successful completion of tasks and penalize errors, can allow companies to become “their own AI laboratory” by improving 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 parts into a production-ready system.

This is where Prime Intellect comes into play.

The startup has developed what it calls a “full stack” for AI agent development, which includes access to computing, a reinforcement learning framework, and assessment tools.

The Prime Intellect platform works like a marketplace, providing standardized access so customers can pick and choose the specific tools they need without being subject to an all-or-nothing system.

“They’ve tied this together and built it in a way that they can operate at the border in an affordable way,” said David Katz, partner at Radical Ventures. While others offer bits and pieces, Prime Intellect is unique in providing tier-one AI lab capabilities as a “one-stop-shop” for development, he added.

The startup’s approach has attracted clients 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 annual revenue rate of $100 million.

This growth is driven by tangible results. For example, Ramp used Prime Intellect to create an agent that helps fintech companies find answers inside spreadsheets. “The result outperforms leading models in terms of accuracy while operating at faster speeds and at a fraction of the cost,” Karim Attia, co-founder and co-CEO of Ramp, said in a statement.

Another key factor driving Prime Intellect’s growth is companies’ recent realization that building atop frontier laboratories carries a number of risks.

Companies are increasingly unwilling to provide their proprietary information to OpenAI and Anthropic because of the risk of losing control of their data. They also worry about relying on models that can suddenly shut down, as happened with Anthropic’s Fable last month.

“How do I know I’m not working with a company that’s going to try to replace me and mainstream what I do,” Katz said. “All of these things make people think, ‘How can I have my own corporate intelligence without taking these risks?’”

Prime Intellect co-founder and CEO Vincent Weisser believes companies are looking to move away from closed-source frontier models, and his company provides the infrastructure needed to make that shift possible.

“It shouldn’t be a few geeks in a glass tower in San Francisco with the ability to train AI models,” he told TechCrunch. “It should be in every institution, in every nation-state.”