Prime Intellect has raised $130 million in Series A funding at a $1 billion valuation, as demand grows for infrastructure that helps companies train and deploy their own AI agents. The round was led by Radical Ventures, with participation from Nvidia Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, Iconiq and existing investors.
The San Francisco-based startup said the new funding brings its total capital raised to more than $150 million. Its platform gives companies access to computing power, reinforcement learning tools and evaluation systems for building agentic AI without relying entirely on closed frontier labs.
Prime Intellect was founded in 2024 and is led by co-founder and chief executive Vincent Weisser. The company’s broader pitch is that enterprises, governments and developers should be able to train specialised AI systems themselves rather than depend only on a small number of major AI labs.
Platform Offers a Full Stack for Agent Development
Prime Intellect describes its product as an open superintelligence stack. It includes access to distributed compute, reinforcement learning infrastructure, environments, model training tools and evaluation systems.
The company has built its platform around reinforcement learning, a method that rewards models for successful task completion and penalises mistakes. That approach is becoming more important for training AI agents that can perform multi-step work, use tools and improve at specific business tasks.
The platform is modular, so customers can use the pieces they need rather than adopt a single closed system. Prime Intellect says this gives companies more control over their data, models and deployment strategy.
Customers include Ramp, Zapier and Flapping Airplanes, according to TechCrunch. Prime Intellect has reached about $100 million in annualized revenue run rate, driven by demand for hosted versions of its tools.
Enterprises Look Beyond Closed AI Labs
Radical Ventures partner David Katz told TechCrunch that Prime Intellect gives companies access to capabilities usually associated with top AI labs, but in a more affordable and flexible package. He said the company stands out because it combines several pieces of agent development infrastructure in one place.
Prime Intellect’s growth also reflects concerns about depending too heavily on closed AI providers. Companies may not want to send proprietary data to outside model makers, and they face risk if a provider changes access, pricing or product availability.
Weisser said the ability to train AI models should not belong only to a few labs in San Francisco. He said every enterprise and nation should have the ability to build its own AI systems.
The company’s own research has focused on distributed AI training. Prime Intellect’s INTELLECT-2 project, published last year, described a 32-billion-parameter reasoning model trained through globally distributed reinforcement learning.
The new funding gives Prime Intellect more capital to expand its infrastructure, product and customer base. It also shows that investors are still willing to back companies building the technical layer beneath the next wave of AI agents.
Featured image credits: Magnific.com
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