Bezos and Bajaj on Prometheus: Live updates

Bezos said he participated in Prometheus’ series B, after contributing a chunk of capital in its first fundraising round.

The startup has shared few details about its other backers.

“We’ve raised money, we have a brilliant team, we have tremendous work ahead of us,” Bezos said.

— Annie Palmer

Bezos, who also leads a space company and serves as executive chair at Amazon after stepping down as CEO in 2021, says he’s allotting most of his time to artificial intelligence.

“Prometheus is the bulk of my time,” the billionaire said. “I’m also spending a lot of time on Blue [Origin]. I’m spending a lot of time on AI at Amazon. So the common thread in my time spent is mostly AI.”

— Samantha Subin

Bezos said it’s “easy to imagine” Prometheus being a customer of Amazon’s cloud business as it requires more compute capacity.

“It’s easy to imagine Amazon or any hyperscaler using the kinds of tools” that Prometheus is developing to improve their data centers,” he added.

Bezos added that his two companies would remain “at arm’s length.”

“We actually have compute from a multitude of sources,” he said. “So we need to, right now, compute is scarce enough that you get it where you can, including AWS.”

— Annie Palmer

Bezos said Prometheus is building a system that can accelerate the “invention loop,” so that people can build tools faster.

“This is an age-old dream,” Bezos said. “The idea that you might build a set of tools that could actually do engineering, an artificial general engineer. It’s a dream that we’ve had, as people thought about for decades, but it’s never really been possible. But now it is, and that’s what we’ve been working on since late 2024.”

He said Prometheus has assembled a team of about 150 people.

“It’s hard work, we’re grinding, but it’s also very interesting,” Bezos said.

— Annie Palmer

Bezos’ AI startup Prometheus raised $12 billion in series B funding, valuing the company at roughly $41 billion.

—Annie Palmer

Bezos’ Blue Origin was dealt a setback last month when one of its New Glenn rockets erupted into a fireball during a hot-fire test at a Space Force launch facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

During the test, Blue Origin’s massive reusable rocket was secured to the launchpad, while its engines were ignited to make sure they worked properly in preparation for an upcoming launch.

The test didn’t go as planned, and the rocket exploded.

Bezos said at the time that it’s “too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it. Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.”

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told CNBC earlier this month that it will “take some serious time” to restore the launchpad.

Blue Origin had just returned New Glenn to the launchpad after an April incident where the company delivered an AST SpaceMobile satellite into the wrong orbit.

The New Glenn rocket was set to ferry a batch of 48 satellites for Amazon’s nascent Leo internet-from-space venture.

—Annie Palmer

Prometheus has mostly operated in stealth since its launch in November, sharing few details about its objectives or potential product pipeline.

Bezos offered a rare window into Prometheus when he spoke to CNBC last month. He said the company has “nothing to do with robotics,” and that it’s developing an artificial general engineer.

“We’re building tools that will make it much easier for engineers to design physical objects,” Bezos said.

He described the system as a “very, very modern version” of CAD, or computer-aided design software, though he cautioned that he’s “really oversimplifying here, and it’s premature for me to give much detail about Prometheus.”

Prometheus operates out of San Francisco, London and Zurich, Switzerland. Prometheus’ LinkedIn page states that the startup has hired about 120 employees.

The page says Prometheus’ mission is “AI for the physical economy.”

—Annie Palmer

Prometheus marks the first time Bezos has assumed a CEO role since he left the helm of Amazon, which he founded, in July 2021. Bezos remains Amazon’s executive chairman, but he has increasingly turned his attention to other pursuits.

Bezos founded Blue Origin, a rocket startup that competes with Elon Musk‘s SpaceX for government contracts and satellite launch missions. He’s also executive chair of the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion climate and biodiversity fund.

—Annie Palmer

Bezos told CNBC last month that AI has been a huge part of his focus over the last few years.

“My time at Amazon is spent on AI, my time at Prometheus is spent on AI … and my time at Blue is largely spent on AI,” he said.

—Chris Eudaily