Amazon's Alexa Fund Expands Focus to AI Startups, Invests in Four Innovative Companies

Amazon's Alexa Fund is now backing AI startups | TechCrunch

Amazon started the Alexa Fund in 2015 to back early-stage voice startups. With the advent of large language models and Amazon launching Gen AI-powered Alexa+ along with a family of multimodal AI models, the fund now wants to broaden its scope and invest more in AI startups. In a blog post Amazon shared with TechCrunch ahead of publication, Alexa Fund leader Paul Bernard explained that the company now wants to invest in areas including AI-enabled hardware and smart agents. "While the Alexa Fund's mission has evolved beyond the initial focus on voice technology over the years, the rapid developments in AI present an inflection point that allows the Fund to embrace new technology while still serving its original mission," Bernard said. "As such, the Fund has been investing in startups that advance the state-of-the-art in AI-enabled hardware, generative media, smart agents, emerging AI architectures, and more. To dive deeper into this evolving investment strategy, we met with Paul Bernard, director of the Alexa Fund, to ask him about the Fund's renewed mission and its recent investments." The fund has invested in four new startups working in different areas: For Amazon, these startups also become a way to put its cloud and AI stack to use. Many of these startups get early access to private APIs and SDKs of Amazon and become a test ground for the e-commerce company. Amazon also said that it provides access to senior execs or opportunities with Amazon Business. All major companies working in AI are trying to fund promising startups that can use their AI models. OpenAI's startup fund has backed numerous companies in the healthcare, robotics, edtech, and creative tools sectors. Anthropic partnered with Menlo Ventures to create an investment vehicle for startups. Google also recently backed companies like the lock screen platform Glance and the webtoons platform Toonsutra and provided them access to different AI models.

Amazon Alexa Fund Expands Scope of Investments to Include AI | PYMNTS.com

The Amazon Alexa Fund has expanded the scope of its investments to include a variety of developments in artificial intelligence (AI). The fund, which was launched in 2015 to provide venture capital funding for voice and smart devices, has also been investing in startups focused on AI-enabled hardware, generative media, smart agents, AI architectures and other projects in the AI field, according to a Wednesday (March 26) blog post from Amazon. Amazon Alexa Fund Director Paul Bernard said in the post that Amazon and Alexa have already been at the forefront of AI, that the company sees opportunities for AI to make customers' lives better, and that fund has expanded its focus without changing its commitment to advance the state of the art. "Some areas we think are really exciting include next-generation assistant experiences with autonomous agents that have specialized expertise and deeper personalization; on-the-go experiences utilizing new sensors and innovative devices beyond smartphone capabilities; emerging AI architectures that will deliver improvements in cost, speed and accuracy; AI-powered media that enable new-to-world experiences across media types and interaction modes; and embedded AI technologies, which have the potential to change how machines interact with the physical world through multimodal perception, advanced reasoning systems and new sensors," Bernard said in the post. Four of the Amazon Alexa Fund's latest investments include NinjaTech AI, which is working on an agentic generative AI assistant; Hedra, which is developing tools for producing video, images and audio; Ario, which has a personal AI assistant designed for parents; and HeyBoss, which has built an AI agent that can design and develop websites and apps, according to the post. "In addition to equity capital, we build a close working relationship between portfolio companies and the many Amazon businesses and technologies that could help advance their vision," Bernard said in the post. Amazon has been deploying AI throughout its own operations. The company said Wednesday that it has been adding AI-powered tools to identify counterfeit items and to help brands and sellers protect their products globally.