Amazon’s Alexa Fund expands its AI scope

Alexa, do you have time for an elevator pitch?

The Alexa Fund, which began in 2015 as a way to seed new startups in Amazon’s then-burgeoning voice ecosystem, is widening its net beyond its namesake platform. The tech giant’s venture arm recently announced several new hardware- and AI-centric investment areas, along with four startups it’s backing as part of that expanded scope.

The announcement follows Amazon’s long-awaited overhaul of its Alexa platform with a slew of new generative AI features. It also comes after Amazon pushed into the foundation model game for the first time with the new family of Nova models it announced last December.

Alexa Fund Director Paul Bernard said Alexa’s expanded capabilities offer more avenues for startups to engage in the platform, although that’s not the fund’s sole focus anymore.

“Our mission is not really about advancing Alexa’s cause, per se, like we start with making bets on these themes that have applicability for many parts of Amazon,” Bernard told Tech Brew. “At the same time, Alexa is getting more capabilities. Alexa has ears, Alexa has eyes, Alexa has screens. And so the applicability of these technologies to Alexa is relevant, and is only going to get more relevant.”

The Alexa Fund will cover five new areas:

• On-the-go: Bernard said this category spans new devices and sensors beyond smartphones, as well as conversational AI and other AI-related mobile products that set the stage for an app-free future, where “customers are removed from the constraints of iOS and app stores.”
• Generative media: “There will be an AI YouTube, there will be an AI Netflix, and we’re interested in things happening in that area,” Bernard said.
• Specialized AI experts: This includes AI agents and chatbots focusing on domains like education, health and wellness, and travel.
• Next-generation architecture: Bernard wants to explore what might come after the current generation of transformer-based models.
• Robotics: Eventual generalized robots and other physical embodiments of AI.

Along those lines, the fund announced new investments in NinjaTech, an AI agent-based assistant platform; AI media generation studio Hedra; Ario, an AI organization assistant for parents; and HeyBoss, a code-free app development platform.

In addition to funding, Alexa Fund also offers founders access to Amazon’s resources, including APIs and software developer kits (SDKs) and partnership opportunities with Amazon businesses. But with a company as vast as Amazon, there’s not necessarily a guarantee that other parts of the company won’t be competing with a given startup.

“Amazon’s a big company, and oftentimes teams at Amazon don’t know what other teams at Amazon are doing. There’s certain things that are self-evident…areas where Amazon is so focused on a product or an experience where it doesn’t make sense for us to be an investor. In most areas, though, it’s very ambiguous, and especially in the world of AI, where so many of these things are going to combine and work together in some complementary way,” Bernard said.

“You’d be surprised at the sophistication of founders in understanding the world is complex and that things are very fluid, and they need to make their own calculations about the virtues of working with us as a fund that has a demonstrated track record of bringing value to our companies.”

Amazon is far from the only tech company using a venture arm to back companies that might complement its AI goals. Salesforce expanded its AI investment fund to $1 billion last September, OpenAI backs a variety of different AI startups, and Cisco rolled out its own $1 billion AI fund last June, among many other similar efforts.