Bezos' AI startup has increased its valuation to $41 billion, what do we know about it?

Prometheus, a so-called industrial artificial intelligence startup led by Jeff Bezos and former top Google executive Vic Bajaj, has raised $12 billion in a Series B funding round, CNBC and Axios report. That raised the company's valuation to about $41 billion.

In an interview with the channel and publication, Bezos first detailed what the startup does. According to him, Prometheus is focused on using AI to simplify the design and creation of physical objects, from jet engines to medical devices and consumer electronics. Such an idea is a colossal bet to fundamentally change the very architecture and principles of production of material objects, Axios writes.

Jeff Bezos' AI startup Prometheus has raised $12 billion in a Series B funding round, raising the company's valuation to about $41 billion, Axios and CNBC report. Investors in the project include JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, DST Global and Arch Venture Partners. In addition, Bezos himself has invested in the project, becoming the largest backer in a $6.2 billion Series A funding round, Axios points out.

Prometheus is focused on creating AI models to solve physical problems, including engineering design, manufacturing and drug development. The startup is still keeping information about its first products secret and is actively hiring talent from companies such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Nvidia, CNBC notes.

"The cycle from conception to mass production and bringing a finished product to market can be very long," Jeff Bezos told Axios. If you approach an incumbent jet engine manufacturer with a request to build the exact same engine, but with 10% more thrust, it could result in a ten-year program, he gave an example. "It's not at all because they [engine manufacturers] are lazy or bad at what they do, but because it's incredibly difficult. So we are creating a set of tools that will allow engineers to reduce cycle times and speed up the process from design to assembly by a factor of 10 or even more," he added.

Both Bezos and Bajaj insist that Prometheus, if successful, will lead to more engineers among humans. "The pace of our physical creation [of products] right now doesn't even come close to matching the pace of human imagination. If we can simplify the process of making things that people dream about come to life, there will be a lot more inventions and a lot more people involved," believes Bajaj.

The artificial intelligence startup launched last November with an initial capital of $6.2 billion. Jeff Bezos, who will step down as head of Amazon in 2021, serves as co-CEO of the company - along with Vic Bajaj, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine who previously co-founded Verily (Alphabet's life sciences research lab), CNBC reports. Prometheus has largely operated in stealth mode since its launch in November, revealing few details about its goals or potential product line, the channel said.

In May, Bezos told CNBC that Prometheus is working on creating an "engineer with artificial intelligence" to simplify the process of designing material objects. Earlier, CNBC recalls, market participants suspected that Prometheus was working on creating robots, but Bezos emphasized that the company was creating artificial intelligence for inventions and physical design.

Prometheus has operations in San Francisco, London and Zurich, Switzerland. Prometheus' LinkedIn page states that the startup has hired about 120 employees. The company's profile also notes that its mission is to "develop AI for the real economy."

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor