Amazon’s Alexa Fund is now backing AI startups

Amazon began the Alexa Fund in 2015 to back early-stage voice startups. With the arrival of huge language fashions and Amazon launching Gen AI-powered Alexa+ together with a family of multimodal AI models, the fund now desires 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 desires to put money into areas together with AI-enabled {hardware} and good brokers.

“Whereas the Alexa Fund’s mission has developed past the preliminary deal with voice expertise over time, the speedy developments in AI current an inflection level that enables the Fund to embrace new expertise whereas nonetheless serving its authentic 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, good 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 concerning 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, pictures, and movies, carry out deep analysis, and schedule conferences for you. Identical to AI assistant platforms, together with Quora’s Poe, NinjaTech AI supplies 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 enables customers to generate pictures, audio, and video by means of its studio. The corporate not too long ago 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 electronic mail decoder to create occasions and motion gadgets by means of college communication. Bernard stated he was impressed by the app as a result of it understands the private context behind duties. Notably, startups like Hearth Display and Maple are additionally engaged on fixing schedule administration for households.
• HeyBoss: It’s laborious to flee the phrase “vibe coding” on the web, particularly when you comply with 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 develop into a strategy 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 develop into a take a look at floor for the e-commerce firm. Amazon additionally stated that it supplies 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 numerous companies in the healthcare, robotics, edtech, and creative tools sectors. Anthropic partnered with Menlo Ventures to create an investment vehicle for startups. Google additionally not too long ago backed firms just like the lock screen platform Glance and the webtoons platform Toonsutra and supplied them entry to completely different AI fashions.