Bezos' Prometheus valued at $41B as startup develops 'AI engineer'

Prometheus, the AI startup founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has been valued at $41 billion (about 63 trillion won).

The valuation came after Prometheus closed a $12 billion Series B funding round, CNBC reported Thursday. The company was officially founded in November last year, making the milestone just over six months in the making.

The round drew participation from financial institutions including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, as well as Bezos himself, who serves as the company's CEO.

In a CNBC interview that day, Bezos said Prometheus is developing not robots but what he calls an "Artificial General Engineer" — an AI capable of performing engineering work. "People have been thinking about this concept for decades, but until now it wasn't possible," he said. "Now it is, and that's what we've been working on since late 2024."

Addressing widespread speculation about Prometheus's goals, Bezos said the company had not been trying to hide anything. "We weren't trying to conceal something — we were just heads-down working," he said, adding that raising capital at this scale inevitably draws curiosity.

He also said Prometheus would become a customer of Amazon Web Services, Amazon's cloud computing division.

"It's not hard to imagine that Prometheus will need a lot of compute capacity and will use tools like AWS," he said, while stressing that the two companies would maintain an independent relationship.

Prometheus currently employs about 150 people. Dr. Vik Bajaj, a former Google X researcher, serves as co-CEO alongside Bezos.

Bezos said he now spends most of his time on Prometheus, with the remainder going to AI work at Blue Origin and Amazon. "Ultimately, the common theme of where I spend my time is mostly AI," he said. The remark echoes comments he made in a previous interview, in which he said he devotes most of his time at Amazon, Prometheus and Blue Origin to AI.

Bezos also weighed in on concerns about AI-driven unemployment and regulation. He rebuffed the notion that AI would harm labor markets, arguing instead that it would boost productivity, reduce working hours and raise living standards. He predicted that as a result, "one person in a dual-income household will step back from the workforce, and people working overtime will stop working overtime."

On regulation, he said sensible rules aimed at improving safety and product quality have value, but cautioned against overreach. "You shouldn't make knives illegal just because they can be used for bad purposes," he said.

Meanwhile, Bezos addressed the explosion of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, which destroyed the launch pad. He said he expects the company to resume flights before the end of this year. "It was the worst day Blue Origin has ever had, and it was a very difficult time for the whole team," he said, but added that long-lead components were spared from the blast. "In many ways, we were lucky," he said.