Prometheus, one of Jeff Bezos’ latest ventures, announced a $12 billion funding round on Thursday, valuing the company at $41 billion.
The artificial intelligence startup was founded in November with $6.2 billion in funding.
Bezos resigned Amazon He will become CEO in 2021 and will serve as co-CEO alongside former co-founder Vik Bajaj, a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine. alphabet’■ Verily is a research institute specializing in life sciences.
CNBC’s David Faber spoke exclusively with Bezos and Bajaj from Prometheus headquarters in San Francisco on Thursday.
Key moments from our exclusive interview:
Speaking in detail about the startup for the first time, Bezos revealed that Prometheus is developing a suite of AI tools to help engineers design and manufacture physical products more easily and quickly. He said it’s still “too early” to reveal what Prometheus has accomplished so far, “but it’s really quite remarkable.”
Bezos said the latest funding round will help Prometheus acquire more compute.
“This is a big part of the money we raised,” he said. “And one of the reasons we had to raise a lot of money is because…what we’re doing is very computationally intensive and we need to create that data.”
Prometheus focuses on building AI models for physical tasks such as engineering, manufacturing, and drug design. The startup has been tight-lipped about its initial products, including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Nvidia.
