Amazon began the Alexa Fund in 2015 to again early-stage voice startups. With the arrival of enormous language fashions and Amazon launching Gen AI-powered Alexa+ together with a household of multimodal AI fashions, the fund now needs to broaden its scope and make investments extra in AI startups.
In a weblog put up Amazon shared with TechCrunch forward of publication, Alexa Fund chief Paul Bernard defined that the corporate now needs to spend money on areas together with AI-enabled {hardware} and sensible brokers.
“Whereas the Alexa Fund’s mission has developed past the preliminary give attention to voice know-how over time, the fast developments in AI current an inflection level that permits the Fund to embrace new know-how whereas nonetheless serving its unique mission,” Bernard stated.
“As such, the Fund has been investing in startups that advance the state-of-the-art in AI-enabled {hardware}, generative media, sensible brokers, rising AI architectures, and extra. To dive deeper into this evolving funding technique, we met with Paul Bernard, director of the Alexa Fund, to ask him in regards to the Fund’s renewed mission and its latest investments.”
The fund has invested in 4 new startups working in numerous areas:
- NinjaTech AI: That is an all-in-one AI firm that has a chatbot with capabilities to generate code, photographs, and movies, carry out deep analysis, and schedule conferences for you. Identical to AI assistant platforms, together with Quora’s Poe, NinjaTech AI gives entry to fashions from Open AI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and Deepseek. Amazon stated the corporate runs its infrastructure on AWS.
- Hedra: Hedra is an AI media firm that permits customers to generate photographs, audio, and video by way of its studio. The corporate not too long ago launched its Character-3 AI for varied types of content material creation. Final 12 months, the corporate raised $10 million from a16z Video games Speedrun, Summary, and Index Ventures.
- Ario: Ario is an AI-powered household administration app to deal with scheduling and duties. The corporate has created a college e-mail decoder to create occasions and motion objects by way of faculty communication. Bernard stated he was impressed by the app as a result of it understands the non-public context behind duties. Notably, startups like Fireplace Show and Maple are additionally engaged on fixing schedule administration for households.
- HeyBoss: It’s exhausting to flee the phrase “vibe coding” on the web, particularly should you observe tech. HeyBoss is a startup in the identical class that allows you to create web sites, apps, video games, or prototypes by simply describing them. Different startups which are working in the identical space embrace Cursor, Lovable, Replit, and Bolt.new.
For Amazon, these startups additionally turn out to be a method to put its cloud and AI stack to make use of. Many of those startups get early entry to personal APIs and SDKs of Amazon and turn out to be a check floor for the e-commerce firm. Amazon additionally stated that it gives entry to senior execs or alternatives with Amazon Enterprise.
All main firms working in AI are attempting to fund promising startups that may use their AI fashions. OpenAI’s startup fund has backed quite a few firms within the healthcare, robotics, edtech, and inventive instruments sectors. Anthropic partnered with Menlo Ventures to create an funding car for startups. Google additionally not too long ago backed firms just like the lock display screen platform Look and the webtoons platform Toonsutra and supplied them entry to completely different AI fashions.