Bernard Arnault, CEO of the world's largest luxury group LVMH, presents the group's annual results for 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 for wealthy investors and consumers. To register to receive future editions directly to your inbox.
Luxury king Bernard Arnault is looking 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 series of investments in artificial intelligence this year through his tech-focused venture capital firm and family office, Aglaé Ventures.
Aglaé made five AI-related investments in 2024, according to data provided exclusively to CNBC by private wealth intelligence platform Fintrx. While the amounts of Aglaé’s investments are not disclosed, the funding rounds for the AI companies totaled more than $300 million, Fintrx said.
The largest funding round this year, according to Fintrx, was in a company called H, formerly known as Holistic AI, a French startup working on full artificial general intelligence. It was founded by former members of from Google DeepMind AI unit and includes venture capital 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, the company said.
Aglaé also invested in a $25 million seed round for Lamini, a Palo Alto, California-based startup that builds AI applications for enterprises. In April, Aglaé was part of a $12 million Series A round for Proxima, a New York-based AI-driven digital marketing company.
Aglaé joined Susquehanna to invest in the $27 million seed round of 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 round in February.
While many of Aglaé's AI investments are recent, the company invested in four rounds of funding between 2017 and 2019 in Paris-based Meero, an AI-based photo creation company, according to Fintrx.
The family office's other investments this year included Sonarverse, a blockchain company based in Irvine, California, and Shimmer, a San Francisco-based provider of ADHD coaching.
According to data from Fintrx, Aglaé has made a total of 153 investments since 2017, including 53 in technology, 17 in consumer goods, 13 in business services and 12 in financial services.
Other investments include Noom, a digital health platform, and World Music Media, a music creation app. Aglaé was part of multiple funding rounds for Back Market, a French marketplace for refurbished electronic products that reported a valuation of $5.7 billion in 2022.
Because the Arnault family's wealth 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 incentive to invest in luxury.
Arnault and his family, however, are avid art collectors, and Aglaé was an investor in a $9.5 million funding round for LaCollection, a digital art platform. LVMH has been rapidly expanding into the luxury watch space, and Aglaé was an investor in the $108 million funding round in 2021 for watch trading platform Chrono24.
While he is known for his dedication to luxury craftsmanship, heritage brands and emotional connections to designers and artists, Arnault is also a huge technology enthusiast with a history of backing successful tech startups. His family office was an early investor in Netflix in 1999, Spotify in 2014 and Airbnb from 2015.
In a May speech at the LVMH Innovation Awards, Arnault said he invested in 75 startups in the 1990s and that “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.