Battle lines are being drawn over AI’s last mile as enterprises must decide if they want to rent or own the model optimization loops that let them build business intelligence.
For most of the last decade, training a frontier model required resources that only a handful of labs could assemble. Reinforcement learning is changing that by allowing a model to improve by acting, through agents, on real tasks and learning from the results. With this new capability, companies can now train models directly using their own data on their own product and optimize for their workflows, running that loop continuously in production.
Owning a model optimization loop means assembling compute, a reinforcement learning framework, environments, evaluations, and deployment into a system that holds up in production. Most companies lack the expertise to do this, which is why this capability has remained within frontier labs.
This week, Radical Ventures announced our lead investment in Prime Intellect’s $130M Series A, joined by NVIDIA Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, and ICONIQ, along with a group of operators building at the frontier.
Prime Intellect is building a full stack for agent development, spanning compute access, environments, sandboxes, evaluations, deployment and large-scale reinforcement learning. It functions as a modular platform, allowing teams to select the specific tools or platform elements they need, or they can use the entire stack for easy agents deployment and post-training. Either way, there is no committing to a single closed system, an approach that brings with it business risk.
Customers running Prime Intellect’s stack are training small, specialized models that outperform frontier models on their own workflows. Ramp trained a 35-billion-parameter agent for spreadsheet retrieval that beat a leading frontier model in accuracy while running 27% faster and at a lower cost. A community of more than six thousand teams runs on Prime Intellect, including enterprise customers like Zapier, Character.AI, Arcee, Browserbase, and Flapping Airplanes.
Prime Intellect has pulled together one of the strongest independent research groups in AI. Co-founder and CEO Vincent Weisser came out of the open-science world, where he co-founded VitaDAO to fund research outside traditional institutions. Co-founder and CTO Johannes Hagemann built large-scale LLM training frameworks at Aleph Alpha. Research lead Will Brown, formerly of Morgan Stanley’s machine learning research group, created verifiers, the open-source library that has become a common tool for building RL environments. The team has drawn top researchers to its open mission and has the record to match, shipping a series of open models on its own infrastructure.
We are excited to support Vincent, Johannes, Will and the entire team as they put frontier-scale training within reach of any company ready to compete in the AI era.