Family offices in the AI ​​space are multiplying as startup fundraising hits a record high

A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to high-net-worth investors and consumers. subscription To receive future issues, directly to your inbox.

Fears of an AI bubble rattled the stock market in February, but investment firms belonging to wealthy families are still betting on high-flying AI startups.

For example, Laurene Powell Jobs’ investment and philanthropy Emerson Collective joined a $1 billion fundraising campaign for AI developer World Labs last month. Marble, World Labs’ first product, allows users to create and edit 3D world models with text and image prompts. The family office of Indian billionaire Azim Premji’s namesake also participated in a $315 million Series E round for Runway, an AI-powered video production startup.

In February, family offices made 41 direct investments in companies, almost all of them related to artificial intelligence, according to data provided exclusively to CNBC by private wealth platform Fintrx.

World Labs and Runway are in good company. AI-related startups raised $171 billion in February, bringing total startup funding for the month from all investors to a record $189 billion, according to Crunchbase data. Anthropic, OpenAI and Waymo took in the lion’s share of the money, while four other companies, including World Labs, received ten-figure rounds.

In other family office deals, Hillspire, the company of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, has invested in a new startup that could benefit the rest of its AI portfolio. Last month, the company joined a $150 million Series B for Goodfire, which aims to understand how AI models work in order to improve them.

Schmidt warned at a conference in October that AI models were vulnerable to being hacked for malicious purposes. However, he said he is generally optimistic about AI and doesn’t buy comparisons to the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s.

“I don’t think that will happen here, but I’m not a professional investor,” he said. “What I do know is that people who invest their hard-earned dollars believe that the economic return over a long period of time is tremendous. Why else would they take the risk?”