Jeff Bezos’s AI startup Prometheus has raised $12 billion at a valuation of about $41 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal, as the company steps out of stealth mode.
Investors in the round include Bezos himself, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock. The company has about 150 employees across offices in San Francisco, London, and Zurich.
The company’s core ambition is the creation of what it calls an “artificial general engineer” — a system envisioned as capable of taking a complex physical product like a jet engine from concept through production. Co-CEO Vik Bajaj — who holds an adjunct professorship at Stanford’s School of Medicine and was among the founders of Google’s life sciences unit — told The Wall Street Journal that Prometheus intends to cover the full arc of engineering work with its AI, spanning initial design decisions and performance modeling all the way through to how a product gets made.
“We’re trying to approach that problem end to end,” Bajaj said.
Bezos — who stepped back from running Amazon in 2021 — framed Prometheus’s purpose in terms of expanding what engineers can accomplish: “to empower engineers and make an invention easier and faster, so smaller teams can do much bigger things on much shorter time cycles.” Bezos told CNBC that Prometheus is working on an “artificial intelligence engineer” that would make it easier for engineers to design physical objects, and described it as “something I got so excited about that I became the co-CEO of the company.”
Separately, The Wall Street Journal has reported that Prometheus explored the possibility of assembling a $100 billion fund to buy up manufacturing companies and use AI to transform how they operate.
Bezos used the occasion to push back on fears about AI and employment. He acknowledged that certain roles will shrink as AI takes hold, but argued the net effect would be a surge in new possibilities and a broad lift in economic output. “There’s going to be two-earner income households where one earner drops out of the labor pool, because there’s going to be so much productivity,” he said.
Founded at the end of 2024 with $6.2 billion in initial funding, the company has drawn staff away from major AI players including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Nvidia. The company sits within a broader industry shift toward industrial AI, where constraints on the technology have increasingly moved from software to physical systems such as manufacturing, energy, and supply chains. Bezos and Bajaj founded the company together, with Bezos taking on a formal operating role for the first time since departing Amazon.
