Prometheus

Prometheus — also known as Project Prometheus — is a physical-AI company co-founded and co-led by Jeff Bezos and the scientist Vik Bajaj. It is building artificial intelligence for the physical world: engineering, manufacturing, and scientific discovery, rather than the text and images that most well-known AI systems generate.

Founded in late 2025 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company describes its goal as an "artificial general engineer" — software that can design, simulate, and help manufacture complex physical systems, from jet engines and automobiles to semiconductors and new drug compounds. Rather than learning only from internet text, its models are trained on real-world experimental data, physical simulation, and robotics interaction, with the aim of giving AI a working grasp of physics, materials, and manufacturing constraints.

Bezos serves as co-chief executive alongside Bajaj, a chemist and physicist who previously worked at Google X and the life-sciences company Verily and co-founded the research incubator Foresite Labs. The partnership puts one of the world's most prominent operators back into a hands-on building role, focused squarely on physical AI rather than consumer chatbots.

Prometheus is among the best-funded startups in history. It launched with roughly $6.2 billion in initial financing and later added a $12 billion round that valued the company at about $41 billion — pushing total funding past $18 billion within roughly seven months. Backers include JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DST Global, and Arch Venture Partners, with Bezos among the largest individual investors.

As of mid-2026 the company has not released a commercial product; its work centers on building foundation models for engineering and manufacturing. Its emergence is widely read as a signal that the frontier-AI race is expanding beyond language models into physical AI aimed at the industries that design and build tangible things.