A mysterious AI startup that has raised 44.1 billion in financing is exposed. It has no products, no official website, and nearly a hundred employees.
On November 17th, according to Zhidongxi's report, citing The New York Times, the mysterious U.S. AI startup Project Prometheus has secured $6.2 billion (approximately RMB 44.1 billion) in financing. Jeff Bezos, the founder and chairman of Amazon, is not only an investor in part of the new financing but will also assist in managing the company as co-CEO.
Three people familiar with the matter revealed that Project Prometheus is currently one of the best-funded early-stage startups globally.
This is the first time that Bezos, 61, has officially taken on an operational role in a company since stepping down as Amazon's CEO in July 2021. Although he is deeply involved in the U.S. commercial space company Blue Origin, his official title is only founder.
▲ Jeff Bezos, founder and chairman of Amazon
According to The New York Times, Project Prometheus is very mysterious. Its founding time and location have not been made public, and it doesn't have an official company website. Its business will focus on the application of AI in multiple fields such as computers, aerospace, and automotive, and the technical areas may highly align with Bezos' business of taking people into space.
People familiar with the matter revealed that Project Prometheus has hired nearly 100 employees, including researchers poached from top AI companies such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta.
The co-founder and co-CEO of this startup is also Vik Bajaj, a U.S. physicist and chemist, who once worked closely with Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, on Google X. Google X is often referred to as the "moonshot factory," and its research progress includes the drone delivery project Wing launched in 2014 and the fully autonomous driving car project initiated by Google in 2009, which is now the autonomous driving company Waymo.
In 2015, Bajaj also co-founded the life science research laboratory Verily, which is also operated by Google's parent company Alphabet. In 2018, he served as the co-founder and CEO of the AI data science startup Foresite Labs. According to people familiar with the matter, he recently resigned from this position to focus on Project Prometheus.
▲ Vik Bajaj, U.S. physicist and chemist, co-founder and co-CEO (Source: Project Prometheus)
It's worth mentioning that Bezos and Musk, two of the top billionaires in the U.S., have previously attracted much attention due to the competition between Blue Origin and SpaceX in the commercial space field. Bezos' entry into the AI startup scene may mean that the competition between the two billionaires has expanded again. However, currently, Project Prometheus' main focus is quite different from that of xAI.
It's noteworthy that the new financing of Project Prometheus also confirms that the investment enthusiasm in the AI field has not diminished at all. According to incomplete statistics from Zhidongxi, there have been multiple large-scale financings since this year:
Thinking Machines Lab, founded by Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI, completed a $2 billion (approximately RMB 14.3 billion) seed round of financing in July this year; in September this year, the French large model unicorn Mistral AI announced that it had received €1.7 billion (approximately RMB 14 billion) in Series C financing, with a post-investment valuation reaching €11.7 billion; in September, the large model unicorn Anthropic announced the completion of a $13 billion (approximately RMB 92.4 billion) Series F financing; at the end of September, the British AI infrastructure company Nscale announced that it had raised $1.1 billion (approximately RMB 7.8 billion) in Series B financing; in October, the AI startup Reflection AI received $2 billion (approximately RMB 14.3 billion) in financing; last week, the popular AI programming tool Cursor announced the completion of a $2.3 billion (RMB 16.32 billion) large-scale Series D financing, with a post-investment valuation reaching $29.3 billion (approximately RMB 207.91 billion).
Conclusion: Bezos' Sudden Entry into the AI Race
May Break Through with Massive Funds and a Top-Notch Team
Previously, Bezos showed a strong interest in AI development. In November last year, he participated in a $400 million financing round of the embodied intelligence AI startup Physical Intelligence. Now, the latest developments of this mysterious startup have been exposed, which means he has officially entered the arena to explore technologies related to AI, computers, aerospace, and automotive.
However, this startup, with no products and its founding time and location undisclosed, already has a large amount of funds and has poached top talents from leading AI companies. This may give it an advantage in the capital-intensive competition of AI development.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Zhidongxi" (ID: zhidxcom), written by Cheng Qian and edited by Xinyuan. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.