Prometheus (Industrial AI Company)

Vik Bajaj had begun working with Jeff Bezos on the company before June 2025. On the morning after an AI-themed dinner he hosted in San Francisco in June 2025, Bajaj formed an entity to acquire General Agents, an agent startup founded by Sherjil Ozair, a former researcher at DeepMindGoogle DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry and Tesla; the two companies merged four days later. The transaction was registered in Delaware, and its terms were not disclosed. General Agents’ product, Ace, is a “real-time computer pilot” that operates a computer according to a user’s instructions.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

On November 17, 2025, it became public that Jeff Bezos would serve as co-CEO of a new company, Project Prometheus, alongside Vik Bajaj. The company launched with $6.2 billion in funding, part of it from Bezos himself, and already had nearly 100 employees, some recruited from the AI divisions of companies such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta. It was Bezos’s first formal operational role since he stepped down as Amazon CEO in July 2021.⁠[2][2][2][3][3]

Bajaj is a physicist and chemist who led life sciences work at Alphabet’s Google X and worked on the project that became Waymo; he co-founded the life sciences company Verily and, in 2018, co-founded Foresite Labs, an incubator that supports entrepreneurs in AI and data science.⁠[2][4][1]

The company positioned itself in AI for the “physical economy,” planning to apply AI to engineering and manufacturing in fields such as computers, aerospace, and automobiles; the systems it seeks to build would learn not only from massive amounts of digital data but also from real-world trial and error. Its LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry page carried a one-line description, “AI for the physical economy,” and Bajaj’s LinkedIn profile listed the company’s locations as San Francisco, London, and Zurich.⁠[2][3][3][4][4]

By late November 2025, the company had more than 100 employees, including Ozair and several former General Agents colleagues; former Nvidia senior research scientist Kamyar Azizzadenesheli had also joined in early 2025. Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit, two former Google researchers who co-authored a famous AI paper, served as founding advisers while running their own startups. At that time, the company’s founding date, formal name, and headquarters had not been made public.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

On June 11, 2026, Prometheus announced that it had raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation, its second funding round; investors included Bezos himself, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRockBlackRockBlackRock is a publicly traded investment management company headquartered in New York, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink and seven others and listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker BLK); its businesses include the iShares family of exchange-traded funds and the Aladdin investment and risk management platform. As of June 30, 2026, its assets under management totaled $15.3 trillion.Open the full entry, among others. The company then had about 150 employees across offices in San Francisco, London, and Zurich and kept the specifics of what it had built undisclosed; Bezos said much of the capital would go toward the company’s large compute needs.⁠[5][5][5][5]

The company says it is building an “artificial general engineer,” software that automates the design and manufacturing of complex physical systems ranging from jet engines to drug compounds. Bezos gave the example that asking an existing jet engine manufacturer for the same engine with 10% more thrust could become a ten-year program because the engineering is so complex; the company’s tools aim to make the cycle from idea to production ten times faster or more. Its focus is not factory-floor robotics and automation but pre-production steps such as prototyping and machinery setup.⁠[5][6][6][6]

By June 2026, the company had dropped “Project” from its name. Prometheus has no corporate ties to Amazon or Blue OriginBlue OriginBlue Origin is a private spaceflight company founded by Jeff Bezos in 2000 and headquartered in Kent, Washington. It develops the reusable suborbital rocket New Shepard, the heavy-lift launch vehicle New Glenn, the BE-4 engine and the Blue Moon lunar lander, and is one of NASA’s lunar lander providers for the Artemis program. In 2026 it took outside investment for the first time, at a valuation of more than $130 billion.Open the full entry; Bezos said the business deserves a dedicated team focused on it alone, while pointing to Blue Origin as a case study of a potential Prometheus customer.⁠[6][6][6]

Bezos acknowledged that Prometheus would automate many parts of an engineer’s job but argued that the productivity gains from AI would produce what he calls “labor scarcity,” meaning demand for human workers outpacing supply; he said significant productivity gains would raise living standards, that some two-earner households could become one-earner households, and that some people working overtime might stop. This view differs from that of some tech figures who predict widespread job losses from AI.⁠[5][5][5]

Forbes’s ranking of the world’s richest people as of October 1, 2026, said private investors valued Prometheus at more than $41 billion, one of the reasons Bezos’s fortune rose that month. Forbes estimated that Bezos owns a 20% stake in the company and described it as his first operational role since he retired as Amazon CEO in 2021.⁠[7][7]