One hundred fifty employees. Forty-one billion dollars. That math would make many industrial conglomerates envious — yet that's exactly where Prometheus landed after closing a $12 billion second funding round from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock.
The startup was co-founded in late 2024 by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, a Stanford professor who previously co-founded Verily, Alphabet's life sciences research arm. Its first round of $6.2 billion closed fast; the second drew equal demand. Bezos says Prometheus now occupies the bulk of his time.
The pitch centers on what the company calls an "artificial general engineer" — software designed to automate the design and manufacturing of complex physical systems: jet engines, pharmaceutical compounds, industrial machinery. Think of it as a next-generation CAD tool built on neural networks, one that doesn't just render blueprints but proposes engineering solutions on its own. Prometheus frames this as "physical AI" — distinct from language models that operate on text and code.
A substantial share of the $12 billion will fund computing infrastructure, without which no serious AI can function. Teams operate from San Francisco, London, and Zurich. The investor lineup speaks for itself: JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock writing checks into the same startup is not a venture experiment — it's a bet that physical-world AI will eventually reshape manufacturing, aerospace, and drug development.
Bezos didn't hedge on jobs. He argues that AI productivity gains will create labor scarcity, not mass unemployment. Whether Prometheus can do to engineering what large language models already did to writing and coding remains to be proven — but the market is now pricing that possibility at $41 billion.
