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Prometheus, the AI startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos and Vic Bajaj, the former co-founder of Google’s Verily life sciences unit, announced it has raised $12 billion at a valuation of $41 billion.
The new money came from Bezos himself, as well as from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock, among others.
This is the second fundraising round for Prometheus, which launched late last year with an initial raise of $6.2 billion. According to CNBC.
Prometheus is building what it calls the “Synthetic General Engineer” — software capable of automating the design and manufacturing of complex physical systems, from jet engines to drug compounds.
The ambition is sweeping: replacing large swaths of engineering work with artificial intelligence. Although the startup will automate many aspects of an engineer’s job, Bezos told CNBC that AI’s productivity gains will lead to what he calls “labor scarcity” — his term for a world in which demand for human workers outstrips supply.
This puts him at odds with a number of prominent voices in technology. While some AI leaders predict widespread job losses, Bezos sees it differently.
He added: “Greater productivity in the economy will lead to raising the standard of living.” “People who today have two-parent families will become single-parent families. Maybe some of the people who work overtime will stop working overtime.”
The company, which currently employs 150 staff across offices in San Francisco, London and Zurich, is keeping details of what it has already built private.
Bezos noted that a significant portion of the capital will go toward the company’s large computing needs.
Bezos knows something about working at scale. Amazon — where he is executive chairman and is the largest individual shareholder — employs more than 1.5 million people worldwide, and over the past year, under CEO Andy Jassy, has laid off employees. Tens of thousands of people as the company accelerated its automation process.
Prometheus, valued at $41 billion, is one of the richest AI startups ever funded, and one of the biggest single bets on the physical AI sector. But it’s not the only company attracting significant interest from investors. In recent months, the number of venture capitalists has increased Pouring capital into physical AIIt’s a booming sector that investors and founders say is inherently more defensible than pure software — because the physical world creates moats that code alone can’t.
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