Laurene Powell Jobs attends the Clinton Global Initiative 2024 Annual Meeting at the New York Hilton Midtown on September 24, 2024 in New York City.
John Nación | Getty Images
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.
Fears of an artificial intelligence bubble shook the stock market in February, but the investment firms of ultra-wealthy families have still made bullish bets on high-flying AI startups.
For example, Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective investment and philanthropy firm participated in a billion-dollar fundraising round last month for AI developer World Labs. World Labs’ first product, Marble, allows users to create and edit models of the 3D world with text and image prompts. And the family office of Indian billionaire Azim Premji also participated in a $315 million Series E funding round for Runway, an AI video generation startup.
In February, family offices made 41 direct investments in companies, almost all of them associated with AI, according to data provided exclusively to CNBC by private wealth management platform Fintrx.
World Labs and Runway are in good company. AI-related startups raised $171 billion in February, bringing the month’s total startup funding from all investors to a record $189 billion, according to Crunchbase data. Seed rounds from Anthropic, OpenAI and Waymo attracted the lion’s share of funds, while four other companies, including World Labs, raised the lion’s share of funds.
In other family office deals, Hillspire, the company of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, has invested in a new startup that could benefit the rest of its AI portfolio. Last month, the company joined a $150 million Series B round for Goodfire, which aims to understand how AI models work in order to improve them.
Schmidt warned at a conference in October that AI models are susceptible to being hacked for malicious purposes. However, he says he is generally optimistic about AI and does not accept comparisons with the dotcom bubble of the early 2000s.
“I don’t think it will happen here, but I’m not a professional investor,” he said. “What I do know is that those who invest hard-earned dollars believe that the economic return over a long period of time is enormous. Otherwise, why would they take that risk?”