Prime Intellect, a startup that provides computing power and specialized software tools that help companies build AI agents, has raised $130 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation.

The massive 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’s goal is to give organizations capabilities to train their own agentic systems without relying on frontier AI labs. While this mission would have been hard to achieve just a few years ago, the rise of reinforcement learning techniques, which iteratively reward successful task completion and penalizes errors, can allow companies to become their “own AI lab” by refining 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 pieces into a production-ready system.

That’s where Prime Intellect comes in.

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

Prime Intellect’s platform functions like a marketplace, providing modular access so customers can pick and choose the specific tools they need without being locked into an all-or-nothing system.

“They’ve stitched this together and built it in such a way that they’re operating at the frontier in a way that’s affordable,” said David Katz, a partner at Radical Ventures. He added that while others offer bits and pieces, Prime Intellect is unique in providing the capabilities of a top-tier AI lab as a “one-stop shop” for development.

The startup’s approach has attracted customers 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 annualized revenue run rate of $100 million.

This growth is driven by the tangible results. For example, Ramp used Prime Intellect to build an agent that helped the fintech find answers inside spreadsheets. “The result beat the frontier models on accuracy while running at faster speeds and a fraction of the cost,” Ramp’s co-founder and co-CEO Karim Atiyeh said in a statement.

Another key factor driving Prime Intellect’s growth is the recent realization by companies that building on top of frontier labs carries a number of risks.

Companies increasingly don’t want to provide their proprietary information to OpenAI and Anthropic due to the risk 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.

“How do I know that I’m not working with a company that is going to try to replace me and generalize to what I’m doing,” Katz said. “All of these things are causing people to think, ‘How do I own my own enterprise intelligence and not have these risks’.”

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

“It shouldn’t just be a few nerds in a glass tower in San Francisco that have the capability to train AI models,” he told TechCrunch. “It should be every enterprise, every nation state.”

U.S. insurance provider AssuranceAmerica has confirmed a data breach affecting the personal information and driver’s license numbers of 6.9 million people, making it the largest known spill of Americans’ driver’s license information this year.

Founded in 1998, AssuranceAmerica provides car and rental insurance to customers across more than a dozen U.S. states. As a large insurance provider, the company handles large amounts of information about prospective insurance customers and vehicle drivers, including their personal information and details about their state-issued driver’s licenses. In the hands of a malicious person, a driver’s license number can be used for fraud and impersonation.

In a data breach notice sent to customers and seen by TechCrunch, AssuranceAmerica said it discovered hackers in its computer systems on March 17. The company concluded its investigation on June 15, finding that the hackers had stolen customers’ names, contact information, and driver’s license numbers. 

The breach notice said the hackers also took information about customers’ auto insurance policies and accounts, their drivers and vehicles, and details about customer claims. 

The company did not provide specifics about which other types of personal information were taken.

AssuranceAmerica did not specify the specific cause of the breach, but noted that the hackers “targeted one of the Company’s employees” and that the company subsequently “disabled compromised credentials.” It’s unclear how those credentials were stolen, but prior incidents involving stolen employee credentials have been linked to password-stealing malware or the use of compromised software.

TechCrunch emailed questions about the incident to AssuranceAmerica CEO Joe Skruck and founder Guy Millner, including asking if the company had any contact with the hackers or paid a ransom. Neither responded.

According to a data breach listing with the Indiana attorney general’s office, AssuranceAmerica listed the breach as affecting 6.99 million people, with notification letters set to be sent out on July 10.

A separate copy of AssuranceAmerica’s data breach notification, shared by the Maine attorney general’s office at TechCrunch’s request, also lists the number of affected people at 6.99 million. (Maine’s data breach portal is currently offline and under review after a fraudulent breach disclosure was published on its website last month.)

The incident at AssuranceAmerica follows a spate of data breaches affecting driver’s licenses and other identity documents in recent months. In June, the Texas state government said hackers stole information about at least 3 million driver’s licenses and passport numbers during a data breach affecting the state’s parks and wildlife division.

TechCrunch has previously reported on several security lapses that together spilled millions of government-issued identity documents, including incidents with a hotel check-in system, a money transfer app, a prison payphone provider and a U.K. visa service. These data spills come as websites and apps are increasingly demanding web users turn over their identity documents to prove they are legally old enough to access them, amid a global push by governments to roll out age verification laws.

As companies old and new rush to capitalize on AI, many AI startups say that their revenue is not just growing, but rapidly accelerating, hitting their next milestones in shorter timeframes.

The following list of startups have reported a pattern of such flywheel growth. One thing to note is that the underlying metrics used by these companies differ, even if they are using the term “ARR.” Some may be referring to annualized recurring revenue (ARR), or revenue under contract from a paying customer but not yet billed. Some are referring to annualized run-rate revenue, or projecting annual income by calculating 12 months of revenue that continues at the rate of the most recent month. Others are referring to “committed ARR,” or signed contracts from customers that are not onboarded yet. In the case of Gusto, it reported actual trailing 12-month revenue.

Nevertheless, each of these startups, listed in reverse chronological order to when their ARR growth was made public, reports that their revenue growth is accelerating, however they are defining it. To be sure, there are many more fast-growing AI startups than we’re naming here, but we are limiting this list to the companies hitting revenue milestones at ever-faster rates.

Mercor: On Monday, Brendan Foody, co-founder and CEO of Mercor, announced that the company has crossed $2 billion in gross annualized revenue as of June — just four months after reaching the $1 billion milestone. The less-than-three-year-old firm, which hires domain experts to train and refine AI models, said that it reached a $500 million run rate in September.

Anthropic: In recent months, this model maker’s revenue has been at such a historic velocity that it has mesmerized the entire AI sector. In late May, Anthropic announced that it crossed $47 billion in revenue run rate, a milestone that came less than two months after the company reported that the same metric surpassed $30 billion. The company said it reached a $9 billion revenue run rate in late 2025, up from a reported $4 billion in July 2025.

Sierra: After reaching its first $100 million in ARR in seven quarters, Sierra—which builds customer service AI agents for enterprises — says it took just two more quarters to add another $100 million, co-founder and CEO Bret Taylor announced in late May.

Glean: In May, Glean announced that it crossed $300 million in ARR. While it took the seven-year-old enterprise AI startup nine months to double its ARR from $100 million to $200 million, the company says it needed just six months to grow that metric from $200 million to $300 million.

Gusto: The 14-year-old HR tech startup announced in May that its revenue accelerated in each of the last five quarters. The company, which was last valued at $9.3 billion in early 2022, also reported that it surpassed $1 billion in trailing 12-month revenue. Gusto’s revenue surge shows that it’s not only AI-native companies that are seeing their top-line growth supercharged by integrating the technology.

Clio: This 18-year-old provider of legal practice management software saw its revenue take off sharply after embedding AI into its offering in 2023.  The company surpassed $200 million in ARR in mid-2024, doubled that figure by late last year, and recently announced that its ARR reached $500 million.