Meet Vikram ‘Vik’ Bajaj: The Scientist Who Now Shares the CEO Chair With Jeff Bezos at a $6 Billion AI Startup

When one of the world’s richest men quietly builds a new AI company—and chooses a co-CEO to run it with him—the tech world naturally pauses to ask: Who is this person? And that question has grown only sharper ever since reports emerged that Jeff Bezos’s newest and most secretive AI venture, Project Prometheus, has appointed Vikram “Vik” Bajaj as co-chief executive.

Backed by over $6 billion in initial capital, Project Prometheus isn’t just another entrant in the generative AI race. Its focus is far more ambitious: creating powerful artificial-intelligence systems for the physical economy—industrial manufacturing, engineered products, scientific workflows, and everything that sits beyond digital pixels and text prompts.

The presence of Bezos brings global attention. But the presence of Bajaj brings something even more valuable: decades of experience at the intersection of deep science, biotech innovation, AI, and moonshot-scale ambition.
He is not a celebrity founder. He is not a flashy Valley personality. He is a scientist’s scientist—someone who has quietly built companies that reshaped life sciences, early cancer detection, health data, and precision biology.

And now, he’s sitting across the table from Jeff Bezos as co-CEO of what could become one of the most influential AI companies of the next decade.

So who exactly is Vik Bajaj?

Vikram “Vik” Bajaj isn’t a typical Silicon Valley executive. His foundation lies in physics, chemistry, and life sciences, and his career spans academia, moonshot labs, breakthrough biotech startups, and billion-dollar innovation hubs.

According to his recently updated LinkedIn, he is now co-founder and co-chief executive of Project Prometheus, with Bezos sharing the top job—a rarity in the tech world, and a sign of how deeply Bezos trusts his scientific leadership.
The appointment was first reported by The New York Times.

Before stepping into the Prometheus mission, Bajaj had already built a formidable portfolio of science-driven ventures:

A builder of next-generation health and biotech companies

• In 2023, he co-founded Xaira Therapeutics, a cutting-edge therapeutics venture. He continues to serve there as Director and Interim President.

• Since 2017, he has been a Managing Director at Foresite Capital, shaping investments across precision health, data science, frontier technologies, and therapeutics.

• He also serves as the co-founder and CEO of Foresite Labs, launched in 2018, where he helped create new companies at the intersection of biology, data, and AI.

The cancer-detection pioneer

Before Foresite, he was the Chief Scientific Officer at GRAIL, a revolutionary life-sciences company focused on early cancer detection, one of the most challenging and high-impact problems in medicine.

Years at Google X and Verily: Where science met moonshots

Bajaj isn’t new to projects with world-changing ambitions.

He co-founded Verily, formerly known as Google Life Sciences, and served as its Chief Scientific Officer from 2013 to 2016—years when Google was aggressively moving into health technology.

During this period, he also worked closely with Google co-founder Sergey Brin at Google X, the company’s legendary “Moonshot Factory.” This is the same division that imagined self-driving cars, internet balloons, and augmented reality glasses.
The NYT report notes that Bajaj’s work at X aligned closely with Brin’s explorations into large-scale scientific and engineering challenges.

Academic roots: A scientist forged in elite institutions

Beyond the corporate and startup world, Bajaj has deep academic roots.

• He has been an Adjunct Associate Professor at Stanford University School of Medicine since 2014.

• He previously served on the Advisory Board of the UC Berkeley College of Chemistry from 2015 to 2021.

His educational journey is equally impressive:

• A Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from MIT—one of the most rigorous scientific programs in the world.

• A combined BA and MS in Biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania.

Across these years, he earned multiple scientific honours, including:

• Anatole Abragam Prize (2012)

• Two R&D 100 Awards (2011, 2013)

• DOE LBL Innovation Grant (2013)

Why Bezos chose him: The science-first leader for a science-first AI era

Project Prometheus is not chasing consumer chatbots or app-store AI tools. It wants to build AI systems capable of reasoning about physical processes, materials, biological systems, and engineered products—areas where Bajaj has spent his entire professional life.

Bezos has always placed his bets on people who can manage complexity at scale—rocket scientists at Blue Origin, operations geniuses at Amazon, and now a deep-science AI innovator for Prometheus.

Bajaj fits the bill perfectly:
an academic researcher, a biotech founder, a cancer-science leader, a moonshot lab builder, and a deep-tech investor—all in one.

The road ahead for Project Prometheus

While details remain under wraps, what’s clear is this: Prometheus is designed to be a high-stakes, high-ambition AI venture operating at the edge of science and engineering. With $6 billion already committed, its scale rivals the largest AI startups globally.

The combination of Jeff Bezos’s strategic machinery and Vik Bajaj’s scientific leadership sets the stage for a new kind of AI company—one that treats physical-world intelligence as the next frontier.

As the AI industry enters a phase where data, biology, materials science, and large-scale infrastructure all start to converge, Bajaj’s appointment signals exactly the direction Prometheus wants to take.

And in that journey, Vikram “Vik” Bajaj now stands as one of the most important—and intriguing—names to watch.