Prometheus, the physical AI startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, former co-founder of Verily, Google’s life sciences unit, has raised $12 billion in a new funding round at a $41 billion valuation, making it one of the most richly valued AI startups ever funded and one of the largest single bets on the emerging physical AI sector.
The round was led by Bezos himself alongside JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock, among other investors. It follows Prometheus’s initial raise of $6.2 billion when the company launched late last year, bringing total funding to more than $18 billion in less than a year of existence.
Prometheus is building what it describes as an artificial general engineer, software capable of automating the design and manufacturing of complex physical systems spanning jet engines, drug compounds, and other intricate engineered products. The ambition is to replace large swaths of traditional engineering work with artificial intelligence, a proposition sweeping enough in scope that Bezos has indicated a significant portion of the fresh capital will go toward the company’s substantial computing requirements.
The startup currently employs 150 people across offices in San Francisco, London, and Zurich. What it has already built remains largely undisclosed.
Bezos offered a striking framing of how he believes physical AI will reshape the labour market, one that runs counter to the predictions of many in the technology industry. While prominent voices in tech have warned of widespread job displacement, Bezos sees a different outcome. He told CNBC that the productivity gains AI delivers will lead to what he calls labour scarcity, a world in which demand for human workers exceeds supply. “Significant productivity in the economy is going to raise the standard of living,” Bezos 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 position sits in some tension with the reality at Amazon, the company where Bezos serves as executive chairman and remains the largest individual shareholder. Amazon employs more than 1.5 million people worldwide and has laid off tens of thousands over the past year as CEO Andy Jassy has accelerated the company’s own automation push.
At $41 billion, Prometheus arrives at a moment of surging investor interest in physical AI broadly, a sector that venture capitalists increasingly argue is more defensible than pure software because the complexities of the physical world create competitive advantages that code alone cannot replicate. Prometheus is the largest and most prominent bet on that thesis to date.
