SAN FRANCISCO — Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus are shaking the trees this week for $100 million to seed Prentis, a new AI lab wagering that the machines' fattest payday lies in automating dull office chores — not in writing software.
Hoffman built LinkedIn. Pincus built Zynga. Now the pair are in talks for the round, and their bet cuts hard against the prevailing wisdom.
The climate helps. AI money is sloshing around like Prohibition gin, and a marquee name still opens the vault faster than a slick deck. Two founders with billion-dollar exits behind them rarely dial an empty phone.
For two years the industry has crowned coding the killer app. Every big lab races to field a smarter programmer's assistant, and venture cash has chased the code by the truckload. Prentis calls that a crowded corner.
Here's the play. Every desk in America runs on routine clicks — forms, invoices, spreadsheets, the endless copy-and-paste that eats the working day. Prentis figures the outfit that teaches AI to grind through that muck laps every code-writing rival on the field.
Call it a neolab — a shop pointed at one use case instead of a moonshot. The pitch is an AI that handles the invisible drudgery of white-collar life: booking, filing, reconciling, hauling numbers from one window to the next. Boring work. Bottomless demand.
The timing's rich. This same week OpenAI trotted out a shiny AI keypad, a physical gadget one reporter pegged as fun for coders and mystifying to everyone else. Fun for coders. That is precisely the crowd Prentis claims is about to lose the spotlight.
Nobody's firing the programmers tomorrow. But Prentis is betting the next hundred million customers never write a lick of code and never will.
Follow the money and the logic holds. China's DeepSeek rattled the whole business, claiming it trained high-performing models on the cheap while skipping the priciest chips. When raw horsepower gets commoditized, the fight shifts to who owns the customer — and Prentis means to stand where the office workers already sit.
The suits smell it too. TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 has carved out a whole stage — the Smart Money Stage — for fintech, payments and AI, wherever the three collide. Money is no longer just the cash in your wallet, and neither is the software that moves it.
None of this guarantees Prentis a red cent. A hundred million buys a lab, a payroll and a thesis — nothing more. But Hoffman and Pincus have struck oil on hunches before, and the smart set is leaning in.
Elsewhere on the wire: SpaceX lofted a fresh batch of V3 Starlink satellites Thursday, ticking boxes on its second Starship V3 flight. The satellites reached orbit. The booster flubbed an engine relight — again.
Half a win. In this racket, that still counts as news.
