Bernard Arnault, founder and CEO of luxury goods company LVMH and the fourth-richest person in the world, has reportedly made several investments in artificial intelligence (AI) companies.
Arnault’s family office, Aglaé Ventures, has made five AI-related investments in 2024, CNBC reported Monday (Aug. 19), citing data provided to it exclusively by private wealth intelligence platform Fintrx.
These investments include H, a French startup formerly known as Holistic AI; Lamini, a California-based startup focused on enterprise AI applications; Proxima, a New York-based AI-powered digital marketing company; Borderless AI, a Toronto-based human resource management platform; and Photoroom, a France-based AI image editor, according to the report.
The amounts Aglaé invested in these companies has not been disclosed, the report said.
In earlier AI-related investments, the family office participated in four funding rounds for Paris-based Meero, an AI-powered photo creation company, between 2017 and 2019, per the report.
Since 2017, Aglaé has made 153 investments, with 53 of them being in companies in the technology sector, according to the report.
Arnault has a long history of investing in successful tech startups, the report said. His family office invested in Netflix in 1999, Spotify in 2014 and Airbnb in 2015.
It was reported in July that major investments in AI firms drove American venture funding to its highest quarterly total in two years.
Venture capital (VC) investments for the second quarter totaled $55.6 billion, up 47% from the $37.8 billion startups in the United States took in during the first quarter.
Among the AI-related investments made during the second quarter were the $6 billion raised by Elon Musk’s xAI and the $1.1 billion raised by CoreWeave.
Tech giants have also been ramping up their investments in AI.
One of the AI firms in which Aglaé invested, Photoroom, told PYMNTS in July that it had amassed over 150 million downloads since its 2019 launch.
The company partnered with Genesis Cloud to test whether green computing can keep pace with the demands of cutting-edge AI development.
“We believe that innovation doesn’t have to come at the cost of sustainability,” Eliot Andres, co-founder and chief technology officer of Photoroom, told PYMNTS. “As an industry leader, it’s our duty to ensure the decisions we’re making lead to the right choice in the environment and model the behavior we want to see in our sector.”
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