Amazon’s Alexa Fund is now backing AI startups

Amazon started the Alexa Fund in 2015 to support starting voice startups at an early stage. With the arrival of large language models and Amazon that are launching ai-driven Alexa+, together with a family of multimodal AI models, the fund now wants to broaden its scope and invest more in AI-startups.

In a blog post, Amazon shared with WAN prior to publication, Alexa Fund leader Paul Bernard explained that the company now wants to invest in areas such as AI-compatible hardware and smart agents.

“Although the mission of the Alexa Fund has evolved further over the years than the first focus on speech technology, the rapid developments in AI present a bending point with which the Fund can embrace new technology and yet serves its original mission,” Bernard said.

“As such, the fund has invested in startups that made the state-of-the-art ahead in AI-compatible hardware, generative media, smart agents, emerging AI architectures and more. To dive deeper into this evolving investment strategy, we have Paul Bernard, director of the Funde Funda Funda, for him and her last Funda Funda Funda. Investments. ”

The fund has invested in four new startups that work in different areas:

• Ninjatech Ai: This is an all-in-one AI company that has a chatbot with possibilities to generate code, images and videos, to conduct deep research and plan meetings for you. Just like AI assistant platforms, including Poe from Quora, Ninjatech AI offers access to models of OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google and Deepseek. Amazon said the company runs its infrastructure on AWS.
• Hedra: Hedra is an AI media company with which users can generate images, audio and video via the studio. The company recently launched Character-3 AI for different forms of content creation. Last year the company collected $ 10 million from A16Z Games Speedrun, Abstract and Index Ventures.
• Ario: Ario is an AI-driven family management app to handle the planning and tasks. The company has made an e -mail decorer at school to make events and action items through school communication. Bernard said he was impressed by the app because it understands the personal context behind tasks. It is striking that startups such as Hearth Display and Maple also work on solving schedule management for families.
• Heyboss: It is difficult to escape from the expression “atmospheric coding” on the internet, especially if you follow technology. Heyboss is a startup in the same category with which you can make websites, apps, games or prototypes by simply describing them. Other startups that work in the same area are cursor, lovable, ReplicateAnd Bolt.new.

For Amazon, these startups also become a way to use his cloud and ai stack to use. Many of these startups get early access to private APIs and SDKs from Amazon and become a test site for the e-commerce company. Amazon also said it offers access to senior execs or opportunities with Amazon Business.

All major companies that work in AI try to finance promising startups that can use their AI models. The Startup fund of OpenAI has supported many companies in the Healthcare, Robotics, Edtech and Creative Tools sectors. Anthropic collaborated with Menlo Ventures to create an investment vehicle for startups. Google also recently supported companies such as the Lock Screen Platform and the Webtoons Platform Toonsutra and gave them access to various AI models.