Jeff Bezos’ family office backed five AI startups in June

A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.

Thanks to Jeff Bezos, summer is off to a strong start for investment firms of the ultra-rich.

In June, the Amazon founder’s family office made five direct investments in startups, accounting for 10% of family office dealmaking, according to exclusive data provided by Fintrx, the private wealth intelligence platform. Bezos Expeditions is now the most active family office investor thus far this year with eight direct investments in private companies, per Fintrx data.

The 21-year-old family office participated in five megarounds for artificial intelligence startups last month, including a $12 billion Series B for Prometheus. The startup, now valued at about $41 billion, counts Bezos as a cofounder and co-CEO. Prometheus aims to create an “artificial engineer” that will speed up the design and manufacturing of physical products from jet engines to pharmaceuticals, Bezos told CNBC’s David Faber on June 11.

“What drives the wealth of nations? What drives civilizational wealth? … The answer is invention,” Bezos said on in an interview on “Squawk Box.” “Our goal at Prometheus, what we’re working on is building a set of tools that accelerate that invention loop. So, how long does it take to improve something? How long does it take to – from idea to actually manufacturing, seeing it rate and have a useful object?”

He added that Prometheus has had to raise so much capital — more than $18 billion to date — in order to build massive datasets, which requires a lot of compute power.

While Prometheus takes up most of Bezos’ time, his namesake investment firm added four new startups to its portfolio with nine-figure rounds: General Intuition, CuspAI, Generalist and Flourish.

Bezos Expeditions’ portfolio illustrates the breadth of approaches and aims for developing AI models. The family firm co-led the fundraises for CuspAI, which is building AI models for chemistry, and Flourish, a startup developing models inspired by the human brain. Another new investment, Generalist, is focused on enabling robots to handle increasingly complex tasks.

Hillspire, the family office of ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, also participated in General Intuition’s $320 million Series A. General Intuition is using millions of hours of video gameplay to train spatial AI models.

Bezos told CNBC earlier this spring that he is unconcerned about an AI bubble.

“Even if it does turn out to be a bubble, you shouldn’t worry about it because the bubble is driving investment and a lot of the investment is going to turn out to be very healthy,” Bezos said in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin on “Squawk Box” in May. “Investors at this moment haven’t learned yet how to discriminate between good ideas and bad ideas, and that’s OK, because the good ideas will pay for all of the losers.”