Jeff Bezos Family Office secured stakes in five AI startups in June – from robot brains to AI for chemical research.
Jeff Bezos isn’t taking a summer break, at least not with his money. As the US business broadcaster CNBC reports, citing data from the analysis platform Fintrx, the Amazon founder’s family office invested in five AI startups in June. This means that one in ten family office startup deals in June were accounted for by Bezos Expeditions.
Five AI deals and a billion-dollar project
Bezos practically made the biggest deal with himself, as his family office participated in the Series B financing round of Prometheus, which, according to CNBC, raised twelve billion US dollars. Bezos himself co-founded the startup. He runs it as CEO. It is now valued at $41 billion.
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Prometheus says it is developing an “artificial engineer” who will develop products more quickly in the future, from aircraft engines to medicines. However, for artificial intelligence to be able to do this, it needs a lot of computing power and data. This has its price, as the startup has already raised more than $18 billion for it.
Four new bets on AI
But Prometheus was far from the only AI deal on Bezos’ shopping list. There were also among them General Intuition, CuspAI, Generalist and Flourish. The companies are pursuing very different approaches.
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CuspAI develops AI models for chemical research, Flourish works on neural networks that are based on the human brain. Generalist builds AI for robots that are supposed to take on increasingly complex tasks. General intuition in turn, trains spatial AI models using millions of hours of video game footage. Hillspire, the family office of former Google boss Eric Schmidt, also took part in its financing round.
Bezos sees no danger from an AI bubble
In any case, Bezos won’t be bothered by a possible AI bubble. He told CNBC in May that even if the market overheated, the high investments would produce innovations in the long term. Good ideas would ultimately help finance the many failed projects.
With eight direct investments in private companies to date, Bezos Expeditions is the most active family office in the AI sector this year, according to Fintrx data cited by the news channel.