Gemini co-founders Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss attend the company’s IPO on the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, United States, September 12, 2025.
Jeenah Moon | Reuters
A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide for wealthy investors and consumers. Register to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
The investment companies of ultra-rich families have scaled back their trading throughout 2025, and the final quarter of the year is not off to a promising start. In October, family offices made 51 direct investments, down 63% on a year-over-year basis, according to data provided exclusively to CNBC by private wealth platform Fintrx.
However, family offices still support massive fundraising for artificial intelligence companies.
Last month, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss’ eponymous investment firm joined a $1.4 billion Series E round for Crusoe, bringing the data center developer’s valuation to $10 billion. Hillspire, the family office of the ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt participated in a $2 billion Series B round for Reflection, the open source AI model lab now valued at $8 billion.
Family office investors have also been involved in previous headline-grabbing rounds, such as Commonwealth Fusion’s $863 million Series B2 fundraising. Hillspire, Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective and Stanley Druckenmiller’s firm Duquesne Family Office joined the power plant development round, announced in August.
Even though family offices are placing fewer bets, they have not deteriorated in large rounds, according to a recent PwC report.
In the first half of 2025, family offices completed 23% fewer transactions, but their value fell only 18% on an annual basis, according to PwC. The proportion of family office transactions exceeding $100 million remained stable at 15%, and those over $500 million decreased by only 1 percentage point, to 3%.
Outsized funding rounds for AI companies helped support deal value. In the first half of this year, family offices made almost the same number of investments in AI and machine learning compared to the same period in 2023, but the deal value almost tripled to $123.3 billion, according to PwC.
But even before the AI wave, family offices preferred to move toward larger deals, according to the consultancy. Over the past decade, the proportion of investments below $25 million has fallen from 70% to 59%. Deals between $25 million and $100 million now account for 26%, up 6 percentage points from 2015, and the share of deals worth more than $100 million increased from 9% to 15%.
The consultancy’s report attributes the trend of family offices seeking bigger returns and their “growing ambitions as major players in the global deals landscape.”