Would-be Bond villain Jeff Bezos is gearing up to throw tens of billions at factories and suppliers that AI is about to clobber.
His new outfit, Project Prometheus, is a code name for a company led by the billionaire and former Google executive Vikram Bajaj, and it is already shopping for scale.
Prometheus raised $6.2bn late last year, valuing the business at about $30bn before any new money, according to people familiar with the deal.
Investors include ARCH Venture Partners founder Robert Nelsen, backing a plan to use AI to rewire manufacturing and industry.
The group is also in talks to raise money for a separate holding company that would buy businesses Bezos and Bajaj think will be hit hardest by the tech.
Two people briefed on the plan said the holding company would be a vehicle for manufacturing transformation, with tens of billions to spend on acquisitions.
That puts a few other AI roll-up efforts in the shade, including vehicles launched by Thrive Capital and General Catalyst to snap up legacy firms and squeeze better margins with software.
Prometheus is already in discussions with sovereign wealth funds, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, about investing in the holding company.
Bezos has also spoken with JPMorgan, chief executive Jamie Dimon, about backing it, according to people with knowledge of the talks.
That would come via the bank’s $10bn Security and Resiliency Initiative, which is pitched as reinforcing American supply chains, and Bezos is an adviser to it.
Prometheus is aiming beyond large language models, building systems that map the real world and understand design and engineering, according to people familiar with its work.
It is targeting manufacturing behind everything from jet engines to computer chips, hoping to make production faster and less resource-intensive.
The company has already acquired industry data to train its systems.
Bezos is co-chief executive, his first management role since stepping down as Amazon’s chief executive in 2021, and is said to be hands-on day-to-day.
Prometheus has recruited more than 100 employees, including staff from OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind and Meta, spanning LLMs, computer vision, weather forecasting and chip optimisation for physics simulations.
Prometheus is based in San Francisco with offices in London and Zurich.
It bought the start-up General Agents in June, the firm behind Ace, a tool that searches the web and takes actions on users’ behalf, and hired founders Sherjil Ozair and William Guss.
The lab has been recruiting engineers near New Delhi to build accurate 3D models of components used in equipment such as engines, according to people familiar with its plans.
It is also linked to the broader race to develop systems that can navigate the physical world, even as rivals pursue “world models” built from video.
ARCH Venture Partners founder Robert Nelsen told an audience at JPMorgan’s healthcare summit last month: “Figuring out how to reinvent the physical world is a big challenge,” and added: “[But] the pace of innovation in AI right now is truly hard to understate.”
Nelsen said Prometheus would be “one of the most important companies in the world”.
