Founded by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, the startup Prometheus has raised $12 billion in a Series B round, achieving a valuation of $41 billion. This was reported by TechCrunch.
The company is developing an AI system aimed at accelerating the design and production of physical objects—from jet engines to medical devices and consumer electronics. The founders refer to the future product as a "universal AI engineer": the system is intended to help speed up the process from idea and prototype to mass production.
In an interview with Axios, Bezos illustrated with the example of a jet engine that modifying the design to increase thrust by 10% can take years due to manufacturing complexities. Prometheus aims to reduce such cycles by tenfold or more.
The startup emphasized that it is not about creating robots or merely automating factories. Prometheus focuses on developing AI for the real economy and the early stages of production: design, modeling, prototyping, and process optimization.
Details about the product and the timeline for public launch remain confidential. According to Axios, the company does not disclose how it trains its models but acknowledges that there is no equivalent of an "internet of manufacturing data" in the industry that can simply be uploaded to a model.
“The cycle from idea to mass production and market launch can be very long,” Bezos noted.
He added that if a task that currently requires 100 engineers and takes 10 years could be completed by 10 engineers in one year, “we would just build a lot more things.” Bajaj further mentioned that making it easier to realize ideas would lead to more inventions and more people involved in the process.
According to Semafor, Prometheus utilizes data from the laws of physics, its own testing, and collaborations with companies. A significant portion of the raised funds will be directed towards computational resources: the startup uses an internal cluster and purchases resources from third-party providers.
This round marks the second for Prometheus—at the end of 2025, the startup raised $6.2 billion. Among the new investors, Axios and Semafor mention JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, DST Global, Arch Venture Partners, and Bezos himself.
Recall that in April, the startup Physical Intelligence, founded by former Google engineers, introduced the π0.7 model. The developers claimed a "qualitative leap" in the AI's ability to generalize skills and perform tasks it was not directly trained for.