Jeff Bezos puts nearly $100M into Internet Explorer creator Thomas Reardon's new brain-inspired AI startup, in a $500M round at a $2.5B valuation
Flourish, a New York neuro-AI startup founded in 2024 by Thomas Reardon (Internet Explorer architect at Microsoft in 1994 and CTRL-labs co-founder who sold the company to Meta in 2019 for between $500 million and $1 billion) and former Amazon S-team executive Rob Williams, closed a $500 million round at a $2.5 billion valuation around 4 June 2026. Jeff Bezos contributed close to $100 million after nearly doubling an initial $50 million commitment. Other investors include Lux Capital, GV (Alphabet), and Catalio Capital. The company is building Cortex AI, an architecture-layer system that uses connectomics, the cell-by-cell mapping of biological neural connections, to design AI models that target 20-50 watts of energy draw, roughly the power consumption of a laptop and an order of magnitude lower than a server-grade GPU. Flourish has no product yet.