Jeff Bezos attended the Viva Technology show held at Parc des Expositions in Paris, France on June 17, 2026.
Chesnot | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter by Robert Frank, a weekly guide for high-net-worth investors and consumers. Sign up to receive future editions directly to your inbox.
Summer is off to a strong start for ultra-wealthy investment firms, thanks to Jeff Bezos.
In June, Amazon Founder family offices have made five direct investments in startups, accounting for 10% of family office deals, according to exclusive data provided by Fintrx, a private wealth intelligence platform. Bezos Expeditions has made eight direct investments in private companies so far this year, making it the most active investor in family offices, according to Fintrx data.
The 21-year-old family office participated in five mega-rounds in artificial intelligence startups last month, including Prometheus’ $12 billion Series B. The startup, currently valued at about $41 billion, counts Bezos as a co-founder and co-CEO. Prometheus aims to create “artificial engineers” 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.
“What drives the wealth of nations? What drives the wealth of civilizations? … The answer is invention,” Bezos said in an interview on “Squawk Box.” “Our goal with Prometheus is, what we’re working on is building a set of tools that accelerates that invention loop. So how long does it take to improve something? How long does it take to go from an idea to actually manufactured, to it being evaluated, to a useful object?”
He added that Prometheus has needed to raise significant funding, more than $18 billion so far, to build large datasets, which requires a lot of computing power.
While Bezos spends most of his time at Prometheus, his eponymous investment firm has added four startups to its portfolio in nine-figure rounds: General Intuition, CuspAI, Generalist, and Flourish.
The Bezos Expeditions portfolio represents a wide range of approaches and goals for developing AI models. The family-owned company co-led funding for CuspAI, which is building AI models for chemistry, and Flourish, a startup developing models inspired by the human brain. Another new investment, Generalist, focuses 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 gameplay to train its spatial AI models.
Bezos told CNBC earlier this spring that he wasn’t concerned about an AI bubble.
“Even if there’s a bubble, you don’t have to 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. “Right now, investors have not yet learned how to distinguish between good ideas and bad ones, and that’s okay, because the good ideas will end up paying for all the losers.”
