Prime Intellect, a startup that provides computing power and specialized software tools to help companies build AI agents, has raised a $130 million Series A at 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 give organizations the ability to train their own agentic systems without relying on frontier AI labs. The rise of reinforcement learning techniques, which iteratively reward successful task completion and penalize errors, has made it possible for companies to become their own AI lab by refining models for specific business tasks. However, the underlying infrastructure remains complex, and most companies lack the expertise to assemble these pieces into a production-ready system. Prime Intellect has developed a “full stack” for AI agent development, including compute access, a reinforcement learning framework, and evaluation tools. Its platform functions like a marketplace, providing modular access so customers can choose specific tools without being locked into an all-or-nothing system.

The startup has attracted customers like Ramp, Zapier, and Flapping Airplanes, who pay for a hosted version of its tools. This adoption has propelled the company to an annualized revenue run rate of $100 million. Ramp used Prime Intellect to build an agent that helped find answers inside spreadsheets. Ramp‘s co-founder and co-CEO Karim Atiyeh stated the result beat frontier models on accuracy while running at faster speeds and a fraction of the cost.

A key factor driving growth is the realization by companies that building on frontier labs carries risks. Companies increasingly don’t want to provide proprietary information to OpenAI and Anthropic due to fear 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. Prime Intellect co-founder and CEO Vincent Weisser believes enterprises want to move away from closed source frontier models, and his company provides the infrastructure for that transition. “It shouldn’t just be a few nerds in a glass tower in San Francisco that have the capability to train AI models,” he said. “It should be every enterprise, every nation state.”