From Seattle's own, GeekWire, June 11:
Jeff Bezos has bankrolled his Blue Origin space venture on his own, selling shares of Amazon stock to get the company to orbit and beyond, but others are chipping in for his next big endeavor.
Prometheus, the AI startup where Bezos is co-CEO, is announcing Thursday morning that it has raised $12 billion in Series B funding at a valuation of roughly $41 billion. Investors in the round include JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DST Global and Arch Venture Partners, according to Axios.
Bezos was the largest backer of the company’s $6.2 billion Series A, and he said in a CNBC interview at the company’s San Francisco headquarters that he participated in the new round as well. The interview, with CNBC’s David Faber, was the first time Bezos and co-CEO Vik Bajaj have spoken together publicly about the secretive venture.
“This is a capital-intensive startup, there’s no question about that,” Bezos said, citing the cost of compute and of building the specialized training data the company needs.
Asked about an eventual IPO, he said it’s “too early to think about that.”
Prometheus, which has dropped the “Project” from its name, is building what Bezos calls an “artificial general engineer,” AI tools meant to speed up the process from design to manufacturing for physical objects, from bridges to chips. Bezos first outlined the idea in a CNBC interview last month.
Speaking this morning, Bajaj cited the example of a jet engine, which takes teams of engineers a decade or more to design, prototype and manufacture — one of the most technically sophisticated and creative acts that humans accomplish, as he described it....
....MUCH MORE
Previously:
November 17, 2025 - "Jeff Bezos Creates A.I. Start-Up Where He Will Be Co-Chief Executive"
March 19, 2026 - "Jeff Bezos aims to raise $100 billion to buy, revamp manufacturing firms with AI, WSJ reports"
The Journal says the big money is in the Middle East and Singapore. It reads as though the new venture is separate from Project Prometheus.April 8 - "Jeff Bezos Is Quietly Building an A.I. Dream Team at Project Prometheus"
