Prometheus, the natural artificial intelligence startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, the former co-founder of Google’s life sciences unit Verily, announced that it has raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation.
The new funds came from Bezos himself, as well as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, among others.
This is the second round of fundraising for Prometheus, which launched late last year with an initial round of $6.2 billion. according to CNBC.
Prometheus builds what it calls an “artificial general engineer” — software capable of automating the design and construction of complex physical systems, from jet engines to drug compounds.
The ambition is sweeping: replace large chunks of mechanical work with artificial intelligence. Although the startup will automate many aspects of an engineer’s job, Bezos told CNBC that the productivity gains offered by artificial intelligence will lead to what he calls “labor scarcity” — his term for a world where demand for human workers outstrips supply.
This puts him at odds with a number of prominent voices in tech. While some AI leaders predict widespread job losses, Bezos sees it differently.
“Significant productivity in the economy will raise living standards,” he said. “People who are two-income households today will become one-income households. Maybe some people who work overtime will stop working overtime.”
The company, which currently has 150 employees in offices in San Francisco, London and Zurich, is keeping the specifics of what it has already built.
Bezos said much of the capital will go toward the company’s big computing needs.
Bezos knows a thing or two about working at scale. Amazon — where he serves as executive chairman and is the largest single shareholder — employs more than 1.5 million people worldwide and last year, under CEO Andy Jassy, laid off tens of thousands people as the company has accelerated its own automation push.
At $41 billion, Prometheus is one of the most valuable startups ever funded and one of the biggest single bets on natural artificial intelligence. But it’s not the only company attracting huge investment interest. In recent months, venture capitalists have increasingly poured capital into physical AI, a booming industry that investors and founders argue is inherently more defensible than pure software — because the physical world creates moats that code alone cannot.
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