Jeff Bezos’s AI lab nears $10 billion fundraise at $38 billion valuation backed by BlackRock and JPMorgan: FT

Jeff Bezos-led AI laboratory, code-named Project Prometheus, is close to finalizing a $10 billion fundraising round at a $38bn valuation, with JPMorgan and BlackRock among the investors, the Financial Times reported today.

Project Prometheus, co-led by chief executive Vikram Bajaj, a former Google X scientist and co-founder of Foresite Labs, launched in November 2025 with $6.2 billion in funding and has quickly scaled to over 120 employees drawn from leading AI firms like OpenAI, xAI, Meta, and DeepMind.

Its core mission is to develop physical AI systems that learn through interaction with the real world, targeting use cases across manufacturing, aerospace, robotics, drug discovery, and logistics automation.

The venture marks the first time Bezos has held an operational role since leaving Amazon in 2021, and signals a broad ambition to reshape physical industries from engineering and architecture to manufacturing.

The deal would make it one of the most richly valued early-stage startups in the world.

Unlike 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 has taken incumbent players decades to accumulate.

Prometheus is separately seeking to raise up to $100 billion for a dedicated investment holding company, according to The Wall Street Journal. The entity aims to acquire majority or minority stakes in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms that are highly susceptible to AI disruption.

The holding company would then feed data from those portfolio businesses back into Prometheus’s AI models.

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 hit $155 billion by 2030, roughly a 4.5x expansion in five years.

The total addressable market for global manufacturing sits at about $16.8 trillion, with AI penetration still below 1%.