Project Prometheus, the physical AI laboratory co-led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former Google X scientist Vikram Bajaj, has closed a $10 billion funding round valuing the company at roughly $38 billion, according to a Bloomberg report. JPMorgan and BlackRock are among the firms participating in the round, which has no lead investor. The company may announce the full investor list in the coming months.
The round extends and builds on a $6.2 billion raise at launch in November 2025, bringing total funding to date to over $16 billion. The valuation makes Project Prometheus one of the most richly valued early-stage startups in the world, despite the company being just five months old, having released no products, published no research, and generated no revenue.
Project Prometheus is building AI systems that understand the laws of physics and can be applied across engineering, manufacturing, and other physical industries, including aerospace, robotics, drug discovery, and logistics automation. Unlike large language models trained on publicly available text, physical AI systems require specialized data on material behaviors, engineering tolerances, and industrial processes, much of which is proprietary and difficult to obtain. The company has already scaled to more than 120 employees, drawing talent from OpenAI, xAI, Meta, and DeepMind. Co-founders Sherjil Ozair and William Guss are also among the company’s leadership.
The investment comes amid an extraordinary period of appetite for AI companies. AI startups attracted $242 billion in venture capital during the first quarter of 2026 alone, representing roughly 80% of all global venture funding, according to Crunchbase. The global AI-in-manufacturing market stood at around $34 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $155 billion by 2030, a roughly 4.5x expansion in five years, against a total addressable market for global manufacturing of approximately $16.8 trillion where AI penetration remains below 1%.
Beyond the AI lab itself, Prometheus is reportedly building a separate holding structure described as a manufacturing transformation vehicle, an entity that would command tens of billions of dollars to acquire businesses the Bezos team believes will be reshaped by physical AI. The strategic logic is that portfolio businesses would feed operational data back into Prometheus’s AI models, creating a self-reinforcing competitive advantage as the systems learn from real-world industrial environments. Target sectors for the holding company would include chipmaking, defense, and aerospace. The venture also marks the first time Bezos has held an operational role since stepping down from Amazon in 2021. Neither Bezos, JPMorgan, nor the project’s co-founders immediately responded to requests for comment, and BlackRock declined to comment.
