Bezos's Prometheus raises $12B to build AI for physical systems

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Prometheus, the physical AI startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, the former co-founder of Verily, Google's life sciences unit, announced it raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation. The new funds came from Bezos himself, as well as from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock, among others. This is the second fundraise 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 an "artificial general engineer" — software capable of automating the design and manufacturing of complex physical systems, from jet engines to drug compounds. The ambition is sweeping: replace large swaths of engineering work with AI. Although the startup will automate many aspects of an engineer's job, Bezos told CNBC that the productivity gains AI delivers will lead to what he calls "labor scarcity" — his term for a world where demand for human workers outpaces supply.

That puts him at odds with a number of prominent voices in tech. While some AI leaders predict widespread job losses, Bezos sees it differently. "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, which currently has 150 employees across offices in San Francisco, London, and Zurich, is keeping the specifics of what it has already built under wraps. Bezos indicated that a large portion of the capital will go toward the company's large compute needs.

Bezos knows something about labor at scale. Amazon — where he serves as 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 tens of thousands of people as the company has accelerated its own automation push. At $41 billion, Prometheus is one of the most richly valued AI startups ever funded, and one of the largest single bets on the physical AI sector.

But it isn't the only company attracting massive investor interest. In recent months, venture capitalists have increasingly poured capital into physical AI, a booming sector that investors and founders argue is inherently more defensible than pure software — because the physical world creates moats that code alone cannot. Why this matters: The massive funding round for Prometheus highlights the growing interest in physical AI, a sector that could transform industries from manufacturing to healthcare.