Inside the New $6.2bn AI Venture Founded by Jeff Bezos

Four years after Amazon founder and one of the world’s richest people, Jeff Bezos, stepped down from his CEO role, he will reportedly be taking a seat at the top spot once again.

According to the New York Times, Jeff will be launching an AI startup called Project Prometheus, which he will help manage as its co-CEO.

The startup will reportedly focus on developing AI for engineering and manufacturing in various fields, including computers, aerospace and automobiles, and has already received US$6.2bn in funding. 

Although Jeff has not been held any leadership roles since leaving Amazon, he has been closely involved with his Blue Origin aerospace company, which he founded in 2000. The business operates the suborbital New Shepard rocket and the New Glenn rocket. 

Project Prometheus lands the Amazon founder right in the middle of the AI race, with its fields of focus, particularly manufacturing in aerospace, potentially aiding Blue Origin’s development.

The rise of the co-chief executives

So far, 2025 has seen a boom in the number of companies adopting the co-CEO structure, including Spotify, which saw Gustav Söderström, co-President and Chief Product and Technology Officer, and Alex Norström taking the top spot, as well as Disney and Oracle.

According to reports, the new startup is no exception. Jeff’s co-Founder and co-Chief Executive is Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who worked closely with Google’s co-Founder Sergey Brin at Google X, an Alphabet Inc. owned research and development company that creates breakthrough technologies, also known as The Moonshot Factory.

According to his LinkedIn, Vik was co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Verity, a research lab dedicated to life sciences operated by Google’s parent company Alphabet.

In 2018, he co-Founded and became CEO of Foresite Labs, a startup that incubated and developed new healthcare companies by combining data science, AI and medicine learning with scientific discovery.

The New York Times reported that Project Prometheus has kept a low profile until now and when it was started is unclear. It is also not yet known where the company will be based.

According to the three anonymous sources who spoke to the paper, the startup has hired nearly 100 employees already, including researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta.

Tech giants taking on startups

Earlier in 2025, several prominent researchers left Meta, OpenAI and Google DeepMind, alongside other AI firms, to found Periodic Labs, an organisation focused on building AI tech for discoveries in areas like physics and chemistry.

Ex-Google and Meta execs have also joined forces as co-founders of AI infrastructure startup Majestic Labs, which secured US$100m in funding.

In 2024, according to the Financial Times, Jeff invested in Physical Intelligence, a startup that is applying AI to robots, founded by William Fedus and Ekin Dogus Cubuk.

Unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot, companies like Periodic Labs and Project Prometheus are aiming to build AI models that learn in more complex ways: analysing enormous amounts of data and pinpointing patterns in information from across the internet.

These systems develop to mimic the ways that people structure sentences, minimising the divide between the styles of human and machine.

According to the people familiar with Project Prometheus who spoke to the New York Times, it will explore similar work to Periodic Labs, including investigating the development of robots operating in labs.