The Briefing: The Bookseller Returns with a Secret AI Project
Issue #2547.1 / November 18, 2025
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Jeff Bezos is building something again. The Amazon founder emerged Monday as co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a new artificial intelligence venture launching with €5.4 billion ($6.2 billion) in funding. It marks his first operational role since stepping down from Amazon in 2021, and the timing tells you everything about where the AI race is heading next.
Project Prometheus focuses on applying AI to engineering and manufacturing across computers, aerospace, and automobiles. The name carries deliberate weight (fire from the gods, after all), but the ambition is straightforward: build systems that learn from physical interactions rather than just digital patterns. Bezos shares the co-CEO role with Vik Bajaj, a physicist who worked with Sergey Brin at Google’s X division on projects that became Waymo and Wing. The company already employs nearly 100 researchers pulled from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta.
The €5.4 billion war chest (partly from Bezos himself) positions Prometheus among the most heavily financed early-stage ventures globally. That figure echoes a broader pattern: AI companies tackling the physical world are commanding extraordinary valuations before shipping products. The work resembles Periodic Labs, which simulates physical phenomena to train AI models, and aligns with Bezos’ year-old investment in Physical Intelligence, an AI robotics firm. For someone who built his fortune transforming retail logistics, the focus on physical systems tracks perfectly.
What made the announcement land differently was context. Hours after Bezos’ news broke, Amazon disclosed plans to raise €13 billion ($15 billion) through its first US bond offering in three years. The proceeds will fund acquisitions, capital expenditures, share buybacks, and AI infrastructure buildouts. The sale attracted €69 billion ($80 billion) in demand at its peak, with pricing on the 40-year portion tightening from 1.15 to 0.85 percentage points above Treasuries. Amazon expects to spend roughly €108 billion ($125 billion) on capital expenditure this year, largely targeting data centers and computing capacity for AWS.
The Amazon bond sale represents more than corporate finance. It confirms that tech’s biggest players are moving past venture funding and tapping public debt markets to finance AI expansion at unprecedented scale. Meta issued €26 billion ($30 billion) in bonds last month. Oracle raised €15.5 billion ($18 billion) in September. Alphabet pulled €21.5 billion ($25 billion) earlier this month across US and European markets. JPMorgan estimates these moves will push US high-grade bond issuance to a record €1.6 trillion ($1.81 trillion) in 2026. The infrastructure demands of AI training and inference are reshaping corporate balance sheets across the sector.
Meanwhile, Japan’s AI ambitions took tangible form. Tokyo-based Sakana AI raised €116 million ($135 million) at a €2.3 billion ($2.65 billion) valuation, bringing total funding to nearly €326 million ($379 million). Founded by former Google researchers Llion Jones and David Ha, Sakana represents Japan’s push toward sovereign AI capabilities, backed by substantial government and private investment. The company focuses on building models tailored to Japanese language and cultural contexts, a strategic hedge against US-dominated foundation models.
The sovereign AI trend extends beyond Japan. The United Arab Emirates’ National Space Science & Technology Center recently contracted with UK satellite startup U-Space, highlighting how nations are diversifying tech partnerships away from traditional aerospace primes. European startups raised over €3.4 billion ($4 billion) across various sectors in recent weeks, with Dialog securing €3.2 million ($3.7 million) for AI sales agents and Holo raising €860,000 ($1 million) for health monitoring combining lab tests with Apple Watch data.
Back in the US, another signal emerged about where capital flows. Corporate spend platform Ramp reached a €27.5 billion ($32 billion) valuation after closing €258 million ($300 million) in new funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. That marks Ramp’s fourth raise in 2025, vaulting from €11.2 billion ($13 billion) in March to its current level in just eight months. The company now generates over €860 million ($1 billion) in annualized revenue while serving 50,000 customers processing more than €86 billion ($100 billion) in annual purchases.
Ramp’s pitch centers on autonomous finance, using AI agents to review expenses, flag fraud, manage cash flow, and optimize spending without human intervention. In October alone, its systems made 26 million decisions across €8.6 billion ($10 billion) in transactions. CEO Eric Glyman frames the platform as infrastructure for companies that “move like lightweights” even as they scale, claiming the average Ramp customer reduces spending by 5% while growing revenue 12% faster than industry benchmarks. The rapid valuation climb reflects investor appetite for AI that produces measurable operational gains rather than speculative capabilities.
The pattern across these stories is unmistakable. While the past two years focused on large language models and chatbots, capital is now chasing AI applications in physical infrastructure, manufacturing, finance operations, and sovereign capabilities. Bezos’ return to an operational role signals that the most ambitious builders see the next frontier in bridging software intelligence with real-world systems. The bond market surge confirms that incumbents recognize the scale of investment required to compete. And the Ramp trajectory demonstrates that buyers will pay premium multiples for AI that automates complex workflows today rather than promising general intelligence tomorrow.
When Vision Beats Valuation
One European company chose a different path. London-based Synthesia rejected a €2.6 billion ($3 billion) acquisition offer from Adobe in October, opting instead to raise additional venture capital at a higher valuation by year-end. Founder and CEO Victor Riparbelli apparently wants to build a standalone business rather than fold into Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite.
Synthesia creates AI-generated video avatars for corporate communications, crossing €129 million ($150 million) in annual recurring revenue after hitting €86 million ($100 million) in April. The company raised €155 million ($180 million) in January at a €1.8 billion ($2.1 billion) valuation, with Adobe participating as a strategic investor months before proposing the full acquisition. Synthesia also held preliminary discussions with Meta about a potential sale earlier in the year, but those talks went nowhere.
The rejection carries weight because it happened despite Adobe offering a 43% premium over Synthesia’s last round. That suggests Riparbelli and his backers believe the standalone opportunity justifies passing on immediate liquidity. AI video generation has become intensely competitive, with multiple well-funded players chasing enterprise customers looking to replace traditional video production with scalable synthetic alternatives. Synthesia’s confidence likely stems from a product-market fit strong enough that independence appears more valuable than integration into a larger platform.
The broader M&A picture supports that calculation. European AI startup acquisitions hit 100 deals in 2025, already surpassing the 85 completed in all of 2024. Yet the highest-profile targets are increasingly choosing to remain independent, banking on continued investor appetite for category-defining positions. For Adobe, the Synthesia rejection represents another setback in AI acquisition strategy after regulators blocked its €17.2 billion ($20 billion) Figma deal. The company now faces building comparable capabilities internally through its Firefly platform while competitors like Synthesia capture market share in adjacent categories.
In Other News
Financial technology saw remarkable momentum last week, with Celero Communications raising €120 million ($140 million) in Series B funding to scale high-bandwidth networking for AI data centers, while biotech firm Artios Pharma added €99 million ($115 million) to expand its DNA-damage-repair oncology pipeline.
OpenAI completed its long-awaited restructuring toward public company readiness despite an ongoing lawsuit from Elon Musk challenging the move, with trial set for March. Microsoft’s €11.2 billion ($13 billion) investment in OpenAI has reportedly appreciated to €116 billion ($135 billion) as the company targets multitrillion-dollar computing commitments.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang disclosed at the company’s GTC event that chip orders extend through the end of 2026, while announcing partnerships with Uber and automakers for self-driving technology that could challenge Tesla’s robotaxi positioning in coming years.
UK startups are bracing for what industry leaders call a “make or break” autumn budget scheduled for November 26, with finance minister Rachel Reeves facing pressure from lobby groups over potential tax hikes on limited partners that could make launching new funds commercially unviable.
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