Prometheus, a new venture by Jeff Bezos, announced on Thursday that it has secured a significant funding round of $12 billion, bringing the company’s valuation to an impressive $41 billion.
The artificial intelligence startup debuted in November with an initial funding of $6.2 billion. Bezos, who transitioned out of his role as CEO of Amazon in 2021, is now co-leading Prometheus with Vik Bajaj, a professor at Stanford University’s School of Medicine and a former co-founder of Alphabet’s Verily, which is dedicated to research in life sciences.
In an exclusive interview with CNBC's David Faber at Prometheus' San Francisco headquarters, Bezos provided insight into the company's vision. He shared that Prometheus is focused on creating a suite of AI tools designed to streamline the process for engineers in both designing and manufacturing physical products. While Bezos indicated that it’s “premature” to reveal specific achievements thus far, he described the progress as “really quite remarkable.”
According to Bezos, the recent funding will primarily enhance Prometheus' computational capabilities. “That constitutes a significant portion of the funding we’ve secured,” he explained. “One of the key reasons we needed substantial investment is due to the compute-intensive nature of our work, which requires generating a vast amount of data.”
Prometheus aims to develop advanced AI models tailored for various physical tasks, including engineering, manufacturing, and drug design. The startup has been discreet about its initial offerings and is actively recruiting talent from leading organizations such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Nvidia.
