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Amazon began the Alexa Fund in 2015 to again early-stage voice startups. With the arrival of huge 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 Trendster 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.
βWhereas the Alexa Fundβs mission has developed past the preliminary deal with voice expertise through the years, the fast developments in AI current an inflection level that enables the Fund to embrace new expertise whereas nonetheless serving its authentic mission,β Bernard mentioned.
βAs 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 Fundβs renewed mission and its latest investments.β
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 Quoraβs Poe, NinjaTech AI supplies entry to fashions from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and DeepSeek. Amazon mentioned the corporate runs its infrastructure on AWS.
Hedra: Hedra is an AI media firm that enables customers to generate photographs, audio, and video by way of its studio. The corporate just lately launched its Character-3 AI for numerous 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 faculty electronic mail decoder to create occasions and motion gadgets by way of faculty communication. Bernard mentioned he was impressed by the app as a result of it understands the private context behind duties. Notably, startups like Fireside Show and Maple are additionally engaged on fixing schedule administration for households.
HeyBoss: It’s laborious to flee the phrase βvibe codingβ on the web, particularly when you observe tech. HeyBoss is a startup in the identical class that permits you to create web sites, apps, video games, or prototypes by simply describing them. Different startups which can be working in the identical space embrace Cursor, Lovable, Replit, and Bolt.new.
For Amazon, these startups additionally change into a option 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 change into a check floor for the e-commerce firm. Amazon additionally mentioned that it supplies 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. OpenAIβs startup fund has backed quite a few firms within the healthcare, robotics, edtech, and artistic instruments sectors. Anthropic partnered with Menlo Ventures to create an funding automobile for startups. Google additionally just lately backed firms just like the lock display screen platform Look and the webtoons platform Toonsutra and offered them entry to completely different AI fashions.
