Amazon began the Alexa Fund in 2015 to support voice startups at an early stage. With the appearance of enormous language models and Amazon introducing Alexa+, together with the family of multimodal AI models, the fund now desires to expand its scope and invest more in AI startups.
In the post on the blog, Amazon released TechCrunch before the publication, the leader of the Fund Alexa Paul Bernard explained that the company now wants to speculate in areas, including AI equipment and intelligent agents.
“While the Alexa Fund’s mission has evolved beyond the initial concentration on voice technology over the years, quick achievements in artificial intelligence are a point of inflection, which allows the fund to adopt a new technology, while serving its original mission,” said Bernard.
“Therefore, the fund invests in startups, which develop the most modern in AI equipment, generative media, intelligent agents, emerging AI architecture and more. To delve into the evolving investment strategy, we met with Paul Bernard, director of the Alexa fund, to ask about the fund’s mission and his latest investment.”
The fund has invested in 4 recent startups working in various areas:
- Ninjatechi AI: This is a versatile AI company, which has a chatbot with the possibilities of generating code, images and movies, conducting deep research and planning for you. Like the AI platform assistant, including Poe Quora, Ninjatech AI provides access to models with OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google and Deepseek. Amazon said the company is infrastructure at AWS.
- Honor: Hedra is an AI media company that enables users to generate images, audio and video via studio. The company has recently launched its own Character-3 AI for various types of content creation. Last 12 months, the company collected $ 10 million from A16Z Games Speedrun, Summary and Index Ventures.
- Silver: ARIO is an AI family management application to support the schedule and tasks. The company has created a school decoder E -Mail to create events and activities as part of college communication. Bernard said he was impressed by the application because he understands the personal context of tasks. In particular, startups resembling Hearth Display and Maples are also working on a schedule management solution for families.
- Heyboss: It is difficult to flee the “atmosphere coding” on the Internet, especially if you follow technology. Heyboss is a startup in the same category that lets you create web sites, applications, games or prototypes, just describing them. Other startups that work in the same area are a cursor, nice, ReploteAND Bolt.recent.
For Amazon, these startups also change into a strategy to use their cloud and AI stack. Many of those startups have early access to personal API and SDK Amazon interfaces and becomes the basis of the test for e-commerce. Amazon also said that it provides access to senior managers or possibilities at Amazon Business.
All fundamental corporations working in artificial intelligence attempt to finance promising startups that may use their AI models. The OPENAI startup fund has supported many corporations in healthcare sectors, robotics, Edtech and creative tools. Anthropic has established cooperation with Menlo Ventures to create an investment vehicle for startups. Google has also recently supported corporations resembling a platform with a lock screen and the Webtoons Toonsutra platform and provided them with access to varied AI models.