Jeff Bezos has bankrolled his Blue Origin space venture on his own, selling shares of Amazon stock to get the company to orbit and beyond, but others are chipping in for his next big endeavor.
Prometheus, the AI startup where Bezos is co-CEO, is announcing Thursday morning that it has raised $12 billion in Series B funding at a valuation of roughly $41 billion. Investors in the round include JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DST Global and Arch Venture Partners, according to Axios.
Bezos was the largest backer of the company’s $6.2 billion Series A, and he said in a CNBC interview at the company’s San Francisco headquarters that he participated in the new round as well. The interview, with CNBC’s David Faber, was the first time Bezos and co-CEO Vik Bajaj have spoken together publicly about the secretive venture.
“This is a capital-intensive startup, there’s no question about that,” Bezos said, citing the cost of compute and of building the specialized training data the company needs.
Asked about an eventual IPO, he said it’s “too early to think about that.”
Prometheus, which has dropped the “Project” from its name, is building what Bezos calls an “artificial general engineer,” AI tools meant to speed up the process from design to manufacturing for physical objects, from bridges to chips. Bezos first outlined the idea in a CNBC interview last month.
Speaking this morning, Bajaj cited the example of a jet engine, which takes teams of engineers a decade or more to design, prototype and manufacture — one of the most technically sophisticated and creative acts that humans accomplish, as he described it.
“What has changed in the last few years is the ability to formulate even something as complicated as that, from design to manufacturing, as an end-to-end AI problem,” Bajaj said.
Asked why they chose to speak now, Bezos said the story was “kind of leaking out,” adding: “If you let that just be a complete void, they’ll fill it with nonsense.”
Bezos also addressed reports that he is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion for an affiliated fund to buy manufacturing companies. He said Prometheus may buy parts of companies that could benefit from its technology, and help them improve their manufacturing processes.
He said he started in late 2024 as a founding investor alongside Bajaj, then “became so impressed by what was happening and the potential that I decided I couldn’t sit on the sidelines and I needed to jump in with both feet.” It’s his first CEO role since stepping down from Amazon in 2021.
“It is a grind, but it’s a good grind,” Bezos said.
The company has about 150 employees, based in San Francisco with teams in London and Zurich. The co-CEOs declined to give a product timeline, saying only that early rollouts are coming.
Checking off other boxes at the end of the interview, Faber had Bezos give an update on Blue Origin after a New Glenn rocket exploded during a launchpad test in Cape Canaveral, Fla., late last month.
“It was a very bad day for Blue, very tough on the whole team,” Bezos said. “We’ve rallied. We’re rebuilding the launch site. We got lucky in a bunch of ways — the longest lead items at the launch site were undamaged by the event. … We’ll be flying again before the end of this year.”
With all eyes on the SpaceX IPO, due Friday, Bezos said, “I’ll be watching along with the rest of you.”
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