Amazon launched its Alexa Fund in 2015 to help early-stage startups in the field of voice. With the introduction of huge models of language and Amazon unveiling Gen AI and Alexa+, along with a range of multimodal AI models The fund is looking to expand its reach and also invest into AI startups.
In an article on its blog Amazon published with TechCrunch before its publication Alexa Fund leader Paul Bernard stated that the company plans to make investments in areas like the development of AI-enabled devices and smart agents.
“While the Alexa Fund’s mission has evolved beyond the initial focus on voice technology over the years, the rapid developments in AI present an inflection point that allows the Fund to embrace new technology while still serving its original mission,” Bernard said.
“As as such as such, the Fund has invested in companies that are advancing the latest technology in AI-enabled hardware and generative media, intelligent agents, new AI technologies, and much more. To understand more about the newest investment strategy we spoke with Paul Bernard, director of the Alexa Fund, to ask questions about the Fund’s newly-redesigned mission and recent investment.”
It has invested capital in 4 fresh companies working in various areas:
- NinjaTech AI: This is a complete AI firm that comes with a chatbot that is able to create code, images and videos, conduct thorough research as well as even schedule appointments for your. Like AI assistant platforms, such as Qora’s Poe, NinjaTech AI provides access to models that come from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and DeepSeek. Amazon stated that it has its infrastructure running on AWS.
- Hedra: Hedra is an AI media company that lets users create audio, images and video using its studio. The company has recently introduced it’s Character-3 AI to assist with various types of content production. In the past year, the company was able to raise $10 million from A16z Games Speedrun, Abstract, and Index Ventures.
- Ario: Ario is an AI-powered family manager app to manage scheduling and other tasks. The company has designed an email decoder for schools to create events and other action items using school communications. Bernard said he was awed by the application because it can understand the personal meaning behind the tasks. Interestingly, startups such as Hearth Display as well as Maple are working on solutions to the issue of managing schedules for families.
- HeyBoss: It’s difficult to stay away from the term “vibe coding” on the web, particularly if you are a tech enthusiast. HeyBoss is a company in the same field that allows you to create websites, games, apps or prototypes simply by writing them down. Other startups operating in this same space comprise Cursor, Lovable, Replit, and Bolt.new.
For Amazon these companies, they also provide a way for Amazon to utilize its AI and cloud stack to work. A majority of these startups receive early access to the private APIs and SDKs from Amazon and are a testing base for the e-commerce firm. Amazon has also stated that it offers access to top executives as well as opportunities through Amazon Business.
Every major company working on AI are seeking to finance promising startups that could benefit from AI models. AI models. OpenAI’s Startup Fund has helped several companies within robotics, healthcare, edtech and creative tools industries. Anthropic has teamed up in partnership with Menlo Ventures to create an investment vehicle to support startups. Google also recently invested in companies such as Glance, the lock screen company Glance and the webtoons platform Toonsutra and also provided access to a variety of AI models.
