Jeff Bezos funds Flourish, a neuroscience-AI startup building brain-inspired AI with $500 million in funding and a $2.5 billion valuation

Flourish, founded by neuroscientist Thomas Reardon and former Amazon executive Rob Williams, raised $500 million in funding with a reported valuation of $2.5 billion. Jeff Bezos contributed $50 million initially, then nearly doubled his stake; other backers include Lux Capital and Google Ventures.

The company is building Cortex AI, a synthetic intelligence system designed to match the computational capacity, learning efficiency, and power budget of the human brain. The team—around two dozen neuroscientists and AI researchers by end of March—will conduct wet lab experiments to study brain architecture while an AI team develops models informed by those discoveries.

Current large language models consume more than 30 times the energy a human brain uses (about 20 watts), require thousands of chips and gigawatts of power, and must train on virtually all written human text yet do not learn continuously after training. Flourish aims to build an AI system that runs on 50 watts or less and adapts to its conditions.