Amazon’s Alexa Fund is now backing AI commenceups

Amazon commenceed the Alexa Fund in 2015 to back timely-stage voice commenceups. With the advent of big language models and Amazon begining Gen AI-powered Alexa+ aextfinished with a family of multimodal AI models, the fund now wants to wideen its scope and spend more in AI commenceups.

In a blog post Amazon splitd with TechCrunch ahead of discloseation, Alexa Fund directer Paul Bernard elucidateed that the company now wants to spend in areas including AI-allowd challengingware and intelligent agents.

“While the Alexa Fund’s mission has prolongd beyond the initial caccess on voice technology over the years, the rapid prolongments in AI current an inflection point that permits the Fund to adchoose new technology while still serving its one-of-a-kind mission,” Bernard shelp.

“As such, the Fund has been spending in commenceups that carry on the state-of-the-art in AI-allowd challengingware, generative media, intelligent agents, emerging AI architectures, and more. To dive presentanter into this evolving spendment strategy, we met with Paul Bernard, honestor of the Alexa Fund, to ask him about the Fund’s renewed mission and its recent spendments.”

The fund has spended in four new commenceups laboring in separateent areas:

• NinjaTech AI: This is an all-in-one AI company that has a chatbot with capabilities to produce code, images, and videos, carry out presentant research, and schedule greetings for you. Just appreciate AI aidant platestablishs, including Quora’s Poe, NinjaTech AI provides access to models from Open AI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and Deepseek. Amazon shelp the company runs its infraarrange on AWS.
• Hedra: Hedra is an AI media company that permits participaters to produce images, audio, and video thcimpolite its studio. The company recently begined its Character-3 AI for various establishs of satisfied creation. Last year, the company elevated $10 million from a16z Games Speedrun, Abstract, and Index Ventures.
• Ario: Ario is an AI-powered family regulatement app to regulate scheduling and tasks. The company has produced a school email decoder to produce events and action items thcimpolite school communication. Bernard shelp he was astonished by the app becaparticipate it comprehfinishs the personal context behind tasks. Notably, commenceups appreciate Hearth Disjoin and Maple are also laboring on solving schedule regulatement for families.
• HeyBoss: It is challenging to escape the phrase “vibe coding” on the internet, especiassociate if you trail tech. HeyBoss is a commenceup in the same categruesome that lets you produce websites, apps, games, or prototypes by equitable describing them. Other commenceups that are laboring in the same area join Cursor, Lovable, Replit, and Bolt.new.

For Amazon, these commenceups also become a way to put its cdeafening and AI stack to participate. Many of these commenceups get timely access to personal APIs and SDKs of Amazon and become a test ground for the e-commerce company. Amazon also shelp that it provides access to anciaccess execs or opportunities with Amazon Business.

All presentant companies laboring in AI are trying to fund promising commenceups that can participate their AI models. OpenAI’s commenceup fund has backed countless companies in the healthattfinish, robotics, edtech, and creative tools sectors. Anthropic partnered with Menlo Ventures to produce an spendment vehicle for commenceups. Google also recently backed companies appreciate the lock screen platestablish Glance and the webtoons platestablish Toonsutra and provided them access to separateent AI models.