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 for the high-net-worth investor and consumer. subscription To receive future issues, directly to your inbox.

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

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

The 21-year-old family office participated in five mega rounds for AI startups last month, including a $12 billion Series B for Prometheus. The startup, now worth about $41 billion, counts Bezos as a co-founder 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 medicines, Bezos told CNBC’s David Faber on June 11.

Bezos said in an interview on the “Squawk Box” program, “What drives the wealth of nations? What drives the wealth of civilization?… The answer is invention.” “Our goal at Prometheus, what we’re working on, is to build a set of tools that accelerate this invention loop. So, how long does it take to improve something? How long does it take — from idea to actual manufacturing, seeing it modified and having something useful?”

He added that Prometheus has had to raise a lot of capital — more than $18 billion so far — in order to build huge data sets, which requires a lot of computing power.

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

The Bezos Expeditions portfolio demonstrates the breadth of methods and goals for developing AI models. The family business has co-led fundraising for CuspAI, which builds AI models of 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 former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, also participated in General Intuition’s $320 million Series A. General Intuition uses millions of hours of video games to train spatial AI models.

Bezos told CNBC earlier this spring that he’s not interested in an AI bubble.

“Even if it turns out to be a bubble, you don’t have to worry about it because a bubble drives investment and a lot of investment will turn out to be very healthy,” Bezos said in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin on “Squawk Box” in May. “Investors at this moment have not yet learned how to distinguish between good ideas and bad ideas, and that is okay, because the good ideas will pay for all the losers.”