Jeff Bezos is making a high-profile return to the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley, this time as co-chief executive of Project Prometheus. But there is another interesting part of this story. He is Vikram “Vic” Bajaj, a scientist-entrepreneur whose career spans biotechnology, education, and cutting-edge AI research. Prometheus has reportedly already secured a whopping $6.2 billion in seed funding. Now it will be jointly led by Bezos and Bajaj.

Reports indicate that while Bezos will focus on empowering the entrepreneurial part of the project, Bajaj will complement him with his scientific and technological strengths to shape the ambitious technological goals.

So, who exactly is the person sharing the CEO seat with Bezos? Vikram Bajaj, known as Vic Bajaj in Silicon Valley, is hardly an outsider to the world where Bezos also lives. With a PhD in Physical Chemistry from MIT, Bajaj has spent years in the tech industry, moving between research institutes and commercial laboratories. He has held academic roles at Stanford University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley.

In Silicon Valley, he is best known for co-founding Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences research arm. At Google’s parent company, Bajaj helped build some of the early bridges between biotechnology, large-scale data science and AI. He later served as Chief Scientific Officer at GRAIL, a high-profile healthcare company focused on early detection of cancer.

And Bajaj has also worked on the venture side. Before joining Project Prometheus, he was a Managing Director at Foresight Capital and the founding CEO of Foresight Labs, an incubator-style collaborative that invests in precision health, machine learning and biotech ventures.

According to reports, his work there included creating companies that applied AI in drug discovery, health analytics, and molecular diagnostics.

In recent years, Bajaj co-founded Zyra Therapeutics, an AI-powered drug development company, and helped build strategy at Foresight Labs, giving him experience in commercializing emerging technologies into commercial products.

Vikram Bajaj’s role in Prometheus

With his impressive career graph, which blends hard science, entrepreneurial experience and practical AI work, Bajaj will work with Bezos as co-CEO to structure Project Prometheus.

According to the NYT report, Bajaj is expected to drive the technical vision at Prometheus, guide its research direction and shape the engineering backbone as the company aims to build large-scale systems capable of tackling real-world industrial problems.

What is Project Prometheus?

Although the company has not made anything public yet, reports suggest that Project Prometheus seeks to merge AI with the physical world and apply advanced LLM to real-world engineering and manufacturing challenges.

There are already many startups and large companies like XAI that are training robots to use AI and perform industrial tasks. However, Prometheus aims to enter the sector before there are clear winners and hope to reshape it.

Reports suggest that the company has already hired around 100 people, including top AI researchers drawn from OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta. The scale of the funding alone puts Prometheus among the best-capitalized AI startups in the world even before its first public product.

For now, Project Prometheus remains largely mysterious. But with its two leaders bringing vast expertise from dramatically different worlds – a tech titan and a scientist-entrepreneur – to steer the ship, the project is said to be well-positioned to become one of the most closely watched AI companies in the years to come.