Jeff Bezos backs five AI startups in June as family office leads 2026 investment surge

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.

Jeff Bezos' Family Office Accelerates AI Bets | PYMNTS.com

The startups include Prometheus, which aims to use AI to accelerate the design and manufacturing of physical products such as jet engines and pharmaceuticals; General Intuition, which is training spatial AI models; CuspAI, which is building AI models for chemistry; Generalist, which is working on robots to handle complex tasks; and Flourish, which is developing AI models inspired by the human brain, according to the report. Bezos is a co-founder and co-CEO of Prometheus, which has raised more than $18 billion to date and is now valued at $41 billion, per the report. Bezos told CNBC's Squawk Box in June: "What drives the wealth of nations? What drives civilizational wealth? ... The answer is invention. Our goal at Prometheus, what we're working on is building a set of tools that accelerate that invention loop." General Intuition said in a post on LinkedIn that Bezos participated in the company's $320 million Series A funding round that valued it at $2.3 billion. "General Intuition is the frontier lab for acting in space and time," the company said in the post. "We build large action foundation models trained on billions of ground truth action-labeled gameplay clips from 17 million monthly active users on Medal, and push the frontier of world models to generate infinite training environments." Bezos Expeditions invested in CuspAI as part of a $400 million financing that more than quadrupled the company's valuation to $2.6 billion, the Financial Times reported June 16. Generalist said in a June 4 blog post that it secured $400 million in new funding, bringing its total raised to more than half a billion dollars, and that Bezos Expeditions was an existing investor that also participated in the latest funding. "The funding gives us the resources to continue to lead in scaling robot learning, from building our next generation models, to scaling our physical data engine, from expanding our compute and training infrastructure, to working with the industries that will bring these systems into everyday use," Generalist said in the post. Flourish raised $500 million at a $2.5 billion valuation, with Bezos contributing close to $100 million, Tech Funding News reported June 5. CNBC reported June 11 that Bezos said: "Prometheus is the bulk of my time. I'm also spending a lot of time on [Blue Origin]. I'm spending a lot of time on AI at Amazon. So, the common thread in my time spent is mostly AI." For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.