LVMH family office doubles down on AI, investing in 5 startups in 2024 alone
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LVMH family office doubles down on AI, investing in 5 startups in 2024 alone
The CEO of LV has personally invested in five AI startups this year.
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LVMH is the world's largest luxury company by market capitalization, and its founder and CEO Bernard Arnault has a net worth estimated at $190.7 billion, making his family the wealthiest in the world.
Besides luxury goods, Bernard Arnault has also been actively investing in artificial intelligence (AI).
In 2024, Arnault’s family office, Aglaé Ventures, has already made five AI-related investments, raising a total of $300 million in funding over the past eight months.
H, founded by former Google DeepMind researchers and previously known as Holistic AI, raised $220 million this May from a group of investors including Bernard Arnault, the former CEO of Google, Samsung, and Amazon. Led by former Stanford researcher Charles Kantor, H aims to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), seeking to create AI as intelligent and efficient as humans.
In March this year, Arnault co-led a $27 million seed round for Canadian startup Borderless AI, which focuses on applying AI to human resources. In February, he also co-led with Balderton Capital a $43 million funding round for French startup Photoroom, which is developing an AI-powered photo editing platform.
Other investment targets include several U.S.-based startups—Arnault backed Lamini, a California-based company specializing in enterprise AI platforms.
In June, the company raised $25 million from Aglaé, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, and Google Brain co-founder Andrew Ng. Similarly, in April, Arnault participated in a $12 million Series A round for Proxima, a New York-based data intelligence software company.
However, the specific investment amounts by Aglaé in these companies have not been disclosed.
Previously, Aglaé also took part in four funding rounds for Meero, a Paris-based AI photography startup, between 2017 and 2019.
Bernard Arnault has long experience in successfully investing in tech startups—his family office invested in Netflix in 1999, Spotify in 2014, and Airbnb in 2015.
Since 2017, Aglaé has made 153 investments, 53 of which were in technology companies.
Notably, the luxury group LV has been increasingly exploring the emerging field of AI in recent years.
In 2021, LVMH signed a five-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud to integrate AI solutions into functions such as demand forecasting and inventory optimization. Last September, the company hosted its second LVMH Data & Artificial Intelligence Summit, focusing on generative AI and gathering hundreds of participants.
In May this year, LVMH also attended VivaTech, Paris’ annual technology trade show, which the group has participated in since its inaugural event in 2016.
At the VivaTech exhibition, the LVMH group awarded seven prizes to startups nominated for various innovation awards, including the Chinese company FancyTech—which developed video production software using generative AI—and BLNG, a company leveraging AI to transform jewelry sketches into visual designs.
At VivaTech, Arnault stated that to stand the test of time, companies must emphasize values such as creativity, quality, entrepreneurship, and efficiency.
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