World’s top luxury group LVMH head Bernard Arnault presents the group’s annual results 2022 in Paris on January 26, 2023.
Stefano Rellandini | AFP | Getty Images
A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.
Luxury king Bernard Arnault is shopping for AI companies.
Arnault, founder and CEO of LVMH and the world’s fourth-richest person with a net worth of $184 billion, has made a string of artificial intelligence investments this year through his tech-focused venture firm and family office, called Aglaé Ventures.
Aglaé made five AI-related investments in 2024, according to data provided exclusively to CNBC by Fintrx, the private wealth intelligence platform. While the amounts of Aglaé’s investments aren’t disclosed, the funding rounds for the AI firms totaled more than $300 million, according to Fintrx.
The largest funding round this year, according to Fintrx, was in a firm called H, formerly known as Holistic AI, a French startup that’s working toward full artificial general intelligence. It was founded by former members of Google’s DeepMind AI unit and includes venture firm Accel Partners LP and Wendy and Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, as investors. The $220 million round in May, which also included Aglaé, valued H at $370 million, according to the company.
Aglaé also invested in a $25 million seed round for Lamini, a Palo Alto, California-based startup building enterprise AI applications. In April, Aglaé was part of a $12 million series A round for Proxima, a New York-based AI-powered digital marketing company.
Aglaé joined Susquehanna to invest in the $27 million seed round for Toronto-based Borderless AI, a human resource management platform. And, it invested in Photoroom, a France-based AI image editor, as part of a $43 million investment round in February.
While many of Aglaé’s AI investments are recent, it invested in four funding rounds between 2017 and 2019 in Paris-based Meero, an AI-powered photo creation company, according to Fintrx.
The family office’s other investments this year were in Sonarverse, an Irvine, California-based blockchain company, and Shimmer, a San Francisco-based provider of ADHD coaching.
Since 2017, Aglaé has made a total of 153 investments, according to Fintrx data, with 53 in technology, 17 in consumer goods, 13 in business services and 12 in financial services.
Its other investments include Noom, a digital health platform, and World Music Media, a music creation app. Aglaé was part of multiple rounds of funding for Back Market, a French-based marketplace for refurbished electronics products that in 2022 reported a valuation of $5.7 billion.
Since the Arnault family fortune is so heavily concentrated in LVMH, with the family owning about 48% of the shares and controlling 64% of the voting rights, Aglaé has little reason to invest in luxury.
Arnault and his family are, however, big art collectors, and Aglaé was an investor in a $9.5 million funding round for LaCollection, a digital art platform. LVMH has expanded rapidly in the luxury watch segment and Aglaé was an investor in the $108 million funding round in 2021 for watch trading platform Chrono24.
While famous for his dedication to luxury craftsmanship, historic brands, and emotional connections to designs and artists, Arnault is also a big technology fan with a history of backing successful tech startups. His family office was an early investor in Netflix in 1999, Spotify in 2014 and Airbnb in 2015.
In a speech in May at the LVMH Innovation Awards, Arnault said he invested in 75 startups in the 1990s, and “some of them made it, but many didn’t.”
“The startup mentality is very close to our values: creativity, quality — it has to work — an entrepreneurial spirit and meaning,” he said.
