Fears of an artificial intelligence bubble rattled the stock market in February, but investment firms of ultra-wealthy families continued to make bullish bets on AI startups.
For example, Laurene Powell Jobs’ investment and philanthropy firm, Emerson Collective, joined a $1 billion fundraising round for AI developer World Labs last month. The company’s first product, Marble, enables users to create and edit 3D world models using text and image prompts. Meanwhile, Indian billionaire Azim Premji’s family office participated in a $315 million Series E round for Runway, an AI video-generation startup.
According to data provided exclusively to CNBC by private wealth platform Fintrx, family offices made 41 direct investments in February, with nearly all of them linked to AI-related companies.
These deals reflect a broader surge in AI funding. AI startups raised $171 billion in February, pushing total startup funding for the month to a record $189 billion, according to Crunchbase. Large rounds from companies including Anthropic, OpenAI and Waymo accounted for a significant portion of the capital raised, while four additional companies, including World Labs, secured billion-dollar funding rounds.
Family offices are also backing startups that aim to strengthen the AI ecosystem itself. Hillspire, the investment firm of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy Schmidt, joined a $150 million Series B round for Goodfire. The startup focuses on understanding how AI models function internally in order to improve their performance.
Schmidt previously warned that AI systems can be vulnerable to hacking and misuse. Despite those risks, he remains optimistic about the sector and rejects comparisons to the dot-com bubble.
“What I do know,” Schmidt said at a conference in October, “is that the people investing hard-earned dollars believe the long-term economic return is enormous.”
