Prometheus, a physical AI startup co-founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has raised $12 billion in a new funding round at a valuation of $41 billion, marking one of the largest single bets yet on the emerging field of AI applied to the physical world.
The startup was co-founded by Bezos and Vik Bajaj, the former co-founder of Verily, Google’s life sciences unit. The new funds came from Bezos himself, along with JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and other investors. This is the company’s second fundraising round, following an initial raise of $6.2 billion when it launched late last year.
Prometheus describes its goal as building an “artificial general engineer” — software capable of automating the design and manufacturing of complex physical systems, ranging from jet engines to drug compounds. The ambition is sweeping: to replace large portions of engineering work with AI.
Despite the scale of automation envisioned, Bezos has pushed back against predictions of widespread job losses from AI, instead describing a future of what he calls “labour scarcity” — a state in which demand for human workers outpaces supply. “Significant productivity in the economy is going to raise the standard of living,” he said. “People who today have two-earner households, they’ll become one-earner households. Maybe some people who are working overtime will stop working overtime.”
The company currently employs 150 people across offices in San Francisco, London, and Zurich, and has kept details of what it has built so far largely under wraps. Bezos indicated that a substantial portion of the new capital will go towards the company’s significant computing requirements.
The figures sit somewhat at odds with Bezos’s own track record on automation and labour. Amazon, where Bezos serves as executive chairman and remains the largest individual shareholder, employs more than 1.5 million people worldwide, and has cut tens of thousands of jobs over the past year under chief executive Andy Jassy as the company accelerates its own automation efforts.
At a $41 billion valuation, Prometheus ranks among the most richly valued AI startups to date. It reflects a broader surge in venture capital flowing into physical AI, a sector that investors and founders argue is more defensible than pure software businesses, on the basis that the physical world creates competitive barriers that code alone cannot replicate.