Jeff Bezos is running a company again. Four years after stepping down as CEO of Amazon, he launched Project Prometheus in November 2025 with $6.2 billion. Now the AI lab is close to raising another $10 billion at a $38 billion valuation, the Financial Times reported Monday, April 20.
JPMorgan and BlackRock are backing the round, according to people FT spoke to. The funding has not closed yet. JPMorgan and BlackRock haven’t publicly commented on the news.
At Project Prometheus, Bezos serves as co-CEO alongside Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who previously ran moonshot projects at Google X, including early work on Wing drones and Waymo self-driving cars.
Project Prometheus is a private startup, not a publicly traded company. It operates from San Francisco with offices in London and Zurich.
Louis Eriakha
What is Jeff Bezos doing with Project Prometheus
The lab builds AI that understands the physical world. Not chatbots or text generators. The technology learns from real-world data in manufacturing, aerospace, robotics, and drug discovery. It trains on how materials respond to stress, how machines fail and how production lines break down.
According to the Financial Times, the private company "aims to use specialist models to speed up manual processes and make them less resource-intensive.”
Project Prometheus has hired over 120 employees, many from OpenAI, Meta, and DeepMind. This month it hired Kyle Kosic, who built Elon Musk's Colossus supercomputer at xAI.
“It has hired hundreds of staff to support efforts, including AI scientists, experts in specific industries and people who have experience building out computing infrastructure," the FT reported.
What is Physical AI?
Unlike Generative AI (like OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Google’s Gemini), which is trained on text and images from the internet, Physical AI is trained on the laws of physics and industrial data.
While a chatbot can write a poem about a rocket, Physical AI understands the mechanical stress on a turbine blade or the exact torque needed for a robotic arm to handle fragile materials.
The Acquisition Plan
Bezos is raising a separate fund worth tens of billions to buy companies in industries his technology will disrupt. He is doing this alongside co-chief executive Vikram Bajaj. Target acquisitions include engineering, architecture, and design firms, according to the FT.
Those purchased companies would feed operational data back into Prometheus's AI systems. Bezos gets both training data and equity stakes in the sectors he plans to transform.
Most AI labs like this license data or form partnerships. Prometheus buys the companies.
This comes as Amazon commits up to $25 billion to Anthropic on Monday, April 20. Big tech is flooding AI with capital at unprecedented scale. The $38 billion valuation makes Prometheus one of the best-funded early-stage startups globally. OpenAI needed eight years to hit $29 billion. Prometheus launched near that mark.
The company competes for talent and computing resources against OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and the AI divisions of Google, Meta, and Microsoft. The new funding gives it runway to build at scale. But physical AI for industrial use remains largely unproven outside narrow applications.
Emmanuel Umahi
