Azim Premji, Founder Chairman of Wipro, speaks during the inauguration of the Wipro Hydraulic Plant in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India on August 22, 2024.
Vishal Bhatnagar | Nuphoto | 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.
Investment firms of ultra-rich families backed away from making deals in March as the Iran conflict roiled the market.
Family offices made 39 direct investments in companies last month, a 25% decline from February after adjusting for the length of the month, according to data provided exclusively to CNBC by Fintrx, a private wealth intelligence platform.
That said, family offices that are still making deals are making bold bets. A quarter of investments last month were part of mega-rounds, or fundraisings exceeding $100 million, according to Fintrx.
In March, Jeff Bezos’ eponymous family office co-led a $1.03 billion funding round for Advanced Machine Intelligence. Also known as AMI Labs, the new startup trains artificial intelligence models on real sensory data, rather than text.
Other billionaires with bold names, such as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban, also participated in the fundraiser.
This trend toward fewer but larger deals is also evident among professional investors.
In the most recent quarter, the total value of global M&A activity rose 26% from the same quarter last year, to $1.2 trillion, but the number of deals fell 17%, according to LSEG data. The second week of March was the worst week for global mergers and acquisitions in more than a year, falling below $33 billion, LSEG found.
However, some family offices remain prolific dealmakers.
In March, the family office of Indian billionaire Azim Premji made at least four direct investments in companies, according to Fintrx. Premji Invest’s largest funding round, which he also led, was a $450 million Series A for Rhoda AI, another startup developing new ways to train artificial intelligence models. Rhoda AI aims to train industrial robots on hundreds of millions of videos. Kleiner Perkins billionaire John Doerr also supported the initiative.