Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s artificial intelligence startup Prometheus said Thursday it has secured an eye-popping $41 billion valuation in a new funding round.
The AI venture, where Bezos serves as co-CEO alongside ex-Google executive Vik Bajaj, raised $12 billion from blue-chip investors that included Goldman Sachs, BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase, Bloomberg reported. Bezos himself also contributed to the round.
Launched in November, Prometheus is building AI tools aimed at streamlining the process of building complicated products like jet engines or medical devices.
“If you go to a current jet engine manufacturer and say you want the exact same engine but with 10% more thrust, it could be a 10-year program,” Bezos said in an interview with Axios. “Not because they’re lazy or bad at their jobs, but because it’s so complex.”
“So what we’re doing is building a set of tools that will empower engineers to compress that cycle time and make that dream-build loop be 10 times faster or even more,” Bezos added.
Prometheus, which does not appear to have a public website, has already built a workforce of 150 employees. The firm does not have direct ties to Amazon or Bezos’s rocket company Blue Origin.
Bezos, 62, has increasingly shifted his focus to AI projects since stepping down as CEO of Amazon in 2021. He still serves as executive chairman of the ecommerce giant.
Currently ranking as the world’s fourth-richest person, Bezos has an estimated net worth of $260 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.