- Prometheus raises $12B Series B at a $41B valuation, backed by JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, DST Global, and Arch Venture Partners, bringing total funding to over $18B
- The physical AI startup, co-led by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, is building what it calls an “artificial general engineer:” AI tools to compress the design-to-manufacturing cycle for physical products from years to months
- Prometheus has 150 staff across San Francisco, London, and Zurich and has not yet disclosed commercial revenue
Most AI companies are racing to build smarter software. Prometheus is racing to redesign how physical things get made. The San Francisco startup, co-led by Jeff Bezos and scientist-entrepreneur Vik Bajaj, announced its $12B Series B, pushing its valuation to $41B and total funding past $18B in less than a year of existence.
Investors in the round include JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, DST Global, and Arch Venture Partners. Bezos, who was the largest backer of the company’s $6.2B Series A at launch in November 2025, contributed again in this round.
A significant portion of the capital is earmarked for compute — the company’s training requirements rival those of the world’s largest frontier AI labs.
What it’s building
Prometheus is pursuing what Bezos calls an “artificial general engineer”: AI tools capable of compressing the full cycle from design to manufacturing for complex physical systems.
The targets include jet engines, medical devices, semiconductors, advanced materials, and consumer electronics. Despite early speculation, the company has nothing to do with robotics. It is building software, specifically a next-generation form of computer-aided design that handles pre-production optimisation: prototyping, simulation, and workflow design before manufacturing begins.
The founders
Jeff Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, has moved from early backer to operational co-CEO — his first return to an executive role since leaving Amazon. Vik Bajaj is a Canadian-American scientist with a PhD in physical chemistry from MIT who co-founded Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) and served as its chief scientific officer. He later led Foresite Labs, an AI-focused biotech incubator, before joining Prometheus as co-founder and co-CEO. Bezos leads business direction and growth strategy; Bajaj drives the scientific vision and model development.
Blue Origin, Bezos’ space company, serves as a natural early testing ground and customer for the platform — though Prometheus operates independently of both Amazon and Blue Origin.
Prometheus has not disclosed revenue or named commercial customers beyond Blue Origin. As of its Series B announcement, the company employs around 150 people.
Bezos and Bajaj have also declined to discuss a widely reported plan to raise a separate capital vehicle to acquire legacy industrial companies whose operational data would feed Prometheus’ models, structured similarly to Berkshire Hathaway. Neither confirmed nor denied the reports in public interviews.
The competition
Prometheus enters a space with well-funded incumbents but faces them from a very different altitude.
PhysicsX, a London-based startup backed by Atomico, Nvidia, Temasek, and Siemens, has raised over $155M to build deep learning models that compress engineering simulations from days to minutes — primarily for aerospace, automotive, and semiconductor applications.
Orbital Industries, formerly Orbital Materials, recently raised $50M Series B led by Plural to use its Orb atomic simulation engine for AI-designed data centre infrastructure.
Both are targeting specific simulation workflows. Prometheus is attempting something broader: a horizontal engineering intelligence that operates across every major physical industry simultaneously, which is either its greatest strength or its most significant risk.
What’s next
“The pace of our physical creation right now is nowhere near the pace of human imagination,” Bajaj told Axios. “If we can make it just a little bit easier to bring to life what people dream of, there’s going to be a lot more invention and a lot more people involved in it.” Both founders insist the technology will create more engineering jobs than it displaces — a claim the market will be watching closely as the company moves from vision to production deployments.
