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 submit Amazon shared with TechCrunch forward of publication, Alexa Fund chief Paul Bernard defined that the corporate now needs to put money into areas together with AI-enabled {hardware} and sensible brokers.
“Whereas the Alexa Fund’s mission has developed past the preliminary concentrate on voice know-how through the years, the fast developments in AI current an inflection level that permits the Fund to embrace new know-how whereas nonetheless serving its authentic mission,” Bernard mentioned.
“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 several 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. Similar to AI assistant platforms, together with Quora’s Poe, NinjaTech AI offers entry to fashions from Open AI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and Deepseek. Amazon mentioned the corporate runs its infrastructure on AWS.
- Hedra: Hedra is an AI media firm that permits customers to generate photographs, audio, and video by its studio. The corporate just lately launched its Character-3 AI for various forms of content creation. Final yr, 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 gadgets by college communication. Bernard mentioned he was impressed by the app as a result of it understands the non-public context behind duties. Notably, startups like Fireside 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 when 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 can be working in the identical space embody Cursor, Lovable, Replit, and Bolt.new.
For Amazon, these startups additionally grow to be a solution to put its cloud and AI stack to make use of. Many of those startups get early entry to non-public APIs and SDKs of Amazon and grow to be a take a look at floor for the e-commerce firm. Amazon additionally mentioned that it offers entry to senior execs or alternatives with Amazon Enterprise.
All main firms working in AI try 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 just lately backed firms just like the lock display platform Look and the webtoons platform Toonsutra and supplied them entry to completely different AI fashions.