Project Prometheus, the physical AI startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos and co-CEO Vikram Bajaj in November 2025, is close to closing a $10 billion funding round that would value the company at $38 billion — making it one of the most richly valued early-stage AI ventures in the world. JPMorgan and BlackRock are among the investors in the round, first reported by the Financial Times. The deal has not been finalized and details could still change.
The numbers
If completed, the round would bring Project Prometheus’s total capital raised to more than $16 billion, combining the new $10 billion with the $6.2 billion the company raised at its launch last year. The company has scaled quickly, growing to more than 120 employees drawn from OpenAI, xAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta. It also has offices in London and Zurich alongside its San Francisco headquarters.
What Project Prometheus is building
Unlike large language models trained on publicly available text, Project Prometheus is focused on physical AI — systems designed to understand the laws of physics and interact with real-world industrial processes. Target applications span manufacturing, aerospace engineering, semiconductor production, robotics, drug discovery, and logistics automation.
The approach requires a fundamentally different kind of training data: not scraped web text, but proprietary industrial datasets covering material behaviors, engineering tolerances, and experimental results from physical processes. This is both the startup’s core differentiator and its primary technical challenge. Much of that data does not exist in public form and must either be generated or acquired.
Co-CEO Vik Bajaj brings deep scientific credibility to that challenge. He holds a PhD in physical chemistry from MIT and spent years at Google X, where he worked on early-stage projects including Wing and Waymo. He also co-founded Alphabet’s Verily and the AI drug discovery company Xaira Therapeutics before joining Bezos to launch Prometheus.
The $100 billion acquisition strategy
Beyond the AI lab itself, Bezos has been in early discussions with investors in the Middle East and Southeast Asia to raise as much as $100 billion for a separate investment fund. The fund would acquire or invest in industrial companies whose operations could be transformed by Prometheus’s technology — and crucially, whose proprietary operational data would then feed back into training the AI models.
The strategy is vertically integrated in a way few AI companies have attempted: build the AI, buy the industries that generate the data the AI needs, and use the AI to improve those industries. It mirrors the logic Bezos applied at Amazon — controlling the supply chain rather than depending on external providers.
The competitive landscape
Project Prometheus is entering one of the most competitive markets in technology, going up against companies with years of head start, billions in infrastructure, and the deepest talent pools in the industry. The physical AI segment is also attracting well-funded challengers specifically targeting the same industrial use cases.
The dominant large language model provider, now valued at over $300 billion. Has expanded beyond pure text into reasoning, vision, and agent-based systems. Prometheus has been actively recruiting from its ranks.
Alphabet's unified AI research arm. Holds deep expertise in scientific AI, robotics, and protein folding. Has a head start in physical-world modeling through projects like AlphaFold and its robotics division.
Elon Musk's AI lab, which has increasingly emphasized real-world and physical applications. Musk publicly called Bezos a copycat when Project Prometheus was announced, citing overlap with xAI's strategic direction.
Founded by William Fedus, former VP of Research at OpenAI and a key architect of ChatGPT's post-training pipeline. Has raised $300 million to build robot-operated research facilities — a direct rival in the physical AI space.
A humanoid robotics startup that has made significant technical progress on autonomous physical agents. Backed by major tech investors and positioned in the same industrial automation space Prometheus is targeting.
What Project Prometheus has that none of its competitors can replicate is Bezos himself — both his track record building Amazon into a global logistics and cloud infrastructure giant, and his estimated $224 billion net worth as a backstop and fundraising engine. This is also the first time Bezos has taken an operational role at a company since stepping down as Amazon CEO in 2021.
Meanwhile, AI investment globally continues its vertical climb. According to Crunchbase, AI startups attracted $242 billion in venture capital in the first quarter of 2026 alone — roughly 80 percent of all global venture funding. The global AI-in-manufacturing market, currently valued at around $34 billion, is projected to reach $155 billion by 2030. Total addressable market for global manufacturing sits at approximately $16.8 trillion, with AI penetration still below one percent.