Jeff Bezos Is Quietly Building an A.I. Dream Team at Project Prometheus
Jeff Bezos has been keeping a low profile since stepping in as co-CEO of Project Prometheus, the code name for his secretive A.I. startup, last year. But behind the scenes, he’s been busy. The company has been raising fresh capital, pursuing acquisitions and aggressively recruiting top talent across Silicon Valley. One of its newest hires is Kyle Kosic, recruited to join Bezos’s initiative after stints at OpenAI and xAI, according to the Financial Times. Kosic joins a fast-growing team filled with alumni from major tech companies. Like many of Project Prometheus’s recruits, he specializes in A.I. infrastructure. Such skills will be crucial as the company aims to transform engineering and manufacturing through automation powered by A.I.
Project Prometheus gives Bezos’s first operational position since stepping down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021. Although he remains the founder of Blue Origin, he’s no longer its chief executive. At Project Prometheus, however, he shares leadership duties with co-founder Vikram Bajaj, a former Google X researcher who also co-founded the life sciences venture Verily and the investment firm Foresite Capital. Since launching in 2025, Project Prometheus has expanded rapidly, filling offices in San Francisco, London and Zurich.
Investors have taken notice. The startup raised $6.2 billion last year and now seeks another $6 billion to develop A.I. systems that move beyond large language models (LLMs) toward physical applications in real-world industries. Bezos and Bajaj are also reportedly in talks to raise a separate $100 million fund to acquire manufacturing companies in sectors such as semiconductors, defense and aerospace that could benefit from A.I. automation.
Kosic will reportedly focus on A.I. infrastructure projects. He previously worked at OpenAI, co-founded Elon Musk’s xAI in 2023, and then returned to OpenAI as technical staff. OpenAI declined to comment on his departure.
Meanwhile, Project Prometheus’s team is expanding fast. Its sparse LinkedIn page lists between 51 and 200 employees and highlights a mission to build “A.I. for the physical economy.” A handful of these staffers joined from Bajaj’s Foresite Capital, while others came from agentic A.I. startup General Agents, which Project Prometheus reportedly acquired last year. That deal brought in co-founders Sherjil Ozair and William Guss, both veterans of DeepMind, Tesla and OpenAI. Other hires hail from Microsoft, Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia and Grammarly, underscoring the startup’s formidable technical bench.
Still, Project Prometheus faces stiff competition in the emerging world of physical A.I. Among its rivals: AMI Labs, a Paris-based startup led by former Meta exec Yann LeCun that recently raised $1 billion in Europe’s largest-ever seed round; World Labs, a Fei-Fei Li–led venture focused on world models that raised $1 billion in February; and Periodic Labs, which merges A.I. with the physical sciences and counted Bezos among its backers during a $300 million seed round last year.
Investment in this sector is surging. Global venture funding for physical A.I. reached $26.7 billion in the first two months of 2026 alone, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report citing Crunchbase data. That figure is expected to jump to $33.5 billion by year’s end—nearly double the total from 2025.