Amazon’s Alexa Fund is now backing AI startups

Amazon started the Alexa Fund in 2015 to back early-stage voice startups. With the advent of large language models and Amazon launching Gen AI-powered Alexa+, along 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 TechCrunch ahead of publication, Alexa Fund leader Paul Bernard explained that the company now wants to invest in areas including AI-enabled hardware 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 such, the Fund has been investing in startups that advance the state-of-the-art in AI-enabled hardware, generative media, smart agents, emerging AI architectures, and more. To dive deeper into this evolving investment strategy, we met with Paul Bernard, director of the Alexa Fund, to ask him about the Fund’s renewed mission and its recent investments.”

The fund has invested in four new startups working in different areas:

• NinjaTech AI: This is an all-in-one AI company that has a chatbot with capabilities to generate code, images, and videos, perform deep research, and schedule meetings for you. Just like AI assistant platforms, including Quora’s Poe, NinjaTech AI provides access to models from OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and DeepSeek. Amazon said the company runs its infrastructure on AWS.
• Hedra: Hedra is an AI media company that allows users to generate images, audio, and video through its studio. The company recently launched its Character-3 AI for various forms of content creation. Last year, the company raised $10 million from a16z Games Speedrun, Abstract, and Index Ventures.
• Ario: Ario is an AI-powered family management app to handle scheduling and tasks. The company has created a school email decoder to create events and action items through school communication. Bernard said he was impressed by the app because it understands the personal context behind tasks. Notably, startups like Hearth Display and Maple are also working on solving schedule management for families.
• HeyBoss: It is hard to escape the phrase “vibe coding” on the internet, especially if you follow tech. HeyBoss is a startup in the same category that lets you create websites, apps, games, or prototypes by just describing them. Other startups that are working in the same area include Cursor, Lovable, Replit, and Bolt.new.

For Amazon, these startups also become a way to put its cloud and AI stack to use. Many of these startups get early access to private APIs and SDKs of Amazon and become a test ground for the e-commerce company. Amazon also said that it provides access to senior execs or opportunities with Amazon Business.

All major companies working in AI are trying to fund promising startups that can use their AI models. 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 also recently backed companies like the lock screen platform Glance and the webtoons platform Toonsutra and provided them access to different AI models.