Prime Intellect, a startup helping companies build their own AI agents without relying on OpenAI or Anthropic, has raised $130 million in Series A funding at a $1 billion valuation, TechCrunch reports. Radical Ventures led the round, joined by Nvidia Ventures, Intel Capital, and Dell Technologies Capital.
Founded in 2024, Prime Intellect offers a "full stack" agent development platform — compute, reinforcement learning frameworks, and evaluation tools — sold as modular building blocks. Customers include Ramp, Zapier, and Flapping Airplanes, propelling the company to a $100 million annualized revenue run rate. Ramp used the platform to beat frontier model accuracy "at faster speeds and a fraction of the cost," said co-CEO Karim Atiyeh.
"It shouldn't just be a few nerds in a glass tower in San Francisco that have the capability to train AI models," said CEO Vincent Weisser. "It should be every enterprise, every nation state."
Analysis
The Fable 5 shutdown last month spooked enterprises. Companies that handed proprietary data to Anthropic watched their access get cut overnight. Prime Intellect is riding that fear — and the pitch of "own your own intelligence" lands hard when the alternative is getting locked out of your own workflows. Nvidia and Intel joining the round isn't charity; they're betting enterprises want their own AI infrastructure, not someone else's API.
