Prime Intellect raises $130M Series A at $1B valuation to decentralize frontier AI training

Prime Intellect, a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure startup, has closed a $130 million Series A funding round at a $1 billion valuation, led by Radical Ventures with participation from NVIDIA Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, and prominent angel investors including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Box CEO Aaron Levie, and OpenAI co-founder John Schulman. The round brings Prime Intellect's total funding to over $150 million since its founding in 2023.

The company provides a distributed compute marketplace and reinforcement learning infrastructure that lets enterprises train and deploy their own AI agents without lock-in to closed frontier labs. Prime Intellect counts 6,000 customers and generates over $100 million in annualized revenue. Customers including Ramp, Zapier, and Flapping Airplanes have used the platform to build models that outperform frontier models at lower cost—Ramp's internally trained model beat Claude Opus on accuracy while running faster and cheaper.

The infrastructure focus attracted heavyweight chip investors. NVIDIA Ventures and Intel Capital see Prime Intellect as part of a broader shift where RL tooling becomes essential for distributed training beyond the major labs. The company emphasizes verifiable compute and open-source model releases, positioning itself as a DePIN-adjacent play on decentralized AI training infrastructure.

For teams building agents at scale: Prime Intellect's ARR and customer traction signal that distributed RL infrastructure is moving from research to production—a shift that could reshape which teams can train competitive agentic models and at what cost. The NVIDIA and Intel backing reflects chipmaker appetite for compute spread beyond hyperscalers.