Prometheus, Jeff Bezos' AI startup, is now worth $41 billion
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Prometheus, the industrial AI startup led by Jeff Bezos and former Google exec Vik Bajaj, today will announce that it's raised $12 billion in Series B funding at a $41 billion valuation.
Why it matters: It's a massive bet to rearchitect how physical things are made, from jet engines to medical devices to consumer electronics.
What they're saying: "The cycle from dream, to manufacturing at rate, to having it out in the world can be very long," Bezos tells Axios.
- "For example, if you go to a current jet engine manufacturer and say you want the exact same engine but with 10% more thrust, it could be a 10-year program. Not because they're lazy or bad at their jobs, but because it's so complex. So what we're doing is building a set of tools that will empower engineers to compress that cycle time and make that dream-build loop be 10 times faster or even more."
Catch up quick: We previously reported that Prometheus (which has dropped the "Project" qualifier) isn't about robotics or automating factories — although Bezos acknowledges that it could be used to design and manufacture both robots and factories.
- Instead, it's using AI to optimize pre-production machinery and processes, such as prototyping.
The big picture: Bezos and Bajaj had been publicly mum on the effort until now.
- They say that Prometheus currently has around 150 employees and seeks to build what they call an "artificial general engineer."
- It doesn't have corporate ties to either Amazon or Blue Origin, with Bezos saying "it deserves a dedicated team that is obsessed with this one thing." However, he also called Blue Origin a "case study for a customer of Prometheus."
Investors include JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DST Global, and Arch Venture Partners. Plus Bezos himself, who was the largest backer in a $6.2 billion Series A round.
The intrigue: Prometheus seems like both a replacement for human engineers and a copilot for them.
- Both Bezos and Bajaj insist that the effort, if it works, will result in more human engineers.
- "The pace of our physical creation right now is nowhere near the pace of human imagination," Bajaj argues. "If we can make it just a little bit easier, or hopefully a lot 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."
Zoom in: There's still a lot we don't know.
- For example, they declined to discuss a reported effort to raise $100 billion for an affiliated holding company that would buy legacy industrial companies that would then feed data into Prometheus (and, presumably, provide those companies with AI solutions in a virtuous cycle).
- In a similar vein, they aren't sharing how Prometheus is being trained, except to acknowledge that there isn't an "Internet of manufacturing data" they can ingest. Same goes for timing or details of its initial product rollout.
The bottom line: Bezos has his billions. Now it's time to build.
