Amazon founder and occasional world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, is launching a new artificial intelligence startup where he will serve as co-CEO. The company, named Project Prometheus, will focus on AI applications for engineering and manufacturing in sectors such as computers, aerospace, and automobiles.
The start-up is launching with $6.2 billion in funding, partly from Bezos, making it one of the world’s most well-funded early-stage companies, reports The New York Times, which cites three people familiar with the matter.
This marks the first time Bezos has taken on a formal operational role at a company since he stepped down as Amazon’s chief executive in July 2021. While he is involved in his space company, Blue Origin, his official title there is founder.
More moonshots
Bezos’s co-founder and co-chief executive at Project Prometheus is Vik Bajaj. Bajaj is a physicist and chemist who previously worked at Google’s X research lab, often called “The Moonshot Factory”. In 2015, Dr. Bajaj was among the founders of Verily, a life sciences lab operated by Google’s parent company, Alphabet. He later co-founded and led Foresite Labs, an incubator for AI and data science start-ups.
Project Prometheus enters a competitive AI market alongside giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as specialised companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The new company is part of a wave focusing on applying AI to physical tasks, including robotics and scientific discovery.
Last year, Bezos invested in Physical Intelligence, a startup that applies AI to robotics. Other new companies in the space include Periodic Labs, founded by researchers from Meta, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind, which has $300 million in backing.
Project Prometheus has already hired nearly 100 employees, including researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta.
