Family offices are clamoring for AI investments

For the wealthy families who manage their own money through a family office, the math right now is simple, according to Djoann Fal, a family office advisor and investor at the private wealth platform Atlas Capital in San Francisco.

A family office might want to put money into something like green energy for the long haul. But in the current environment, if a fund manager offers a deal that could triple an investor’s money over three years, and another deal could triple it in three months, the choice is easy. As Fal put it: If they have one deal that has the chance to make them 3x in three years, and another deal that could make them 3x in one quarter, “they’re just going to invest in the AI deal that does 3x in 3 months.”

It isn’t surprising that family offices want in on the action, given that everything around AI is so hot right now, from valuations to pricing to the potential for returns. A bigger shift is that they no longer necessarily want to invest the traditional way, through a venture capital fund manager. Instead, family offices are increasingly buying existing shares in a private company from existing shareholders, or making direct deals on their own. Both approaches get them exposure to the hottest companies without having to hand over control of their money to a fund manager for a decade.

“They have more dry powder to chase single-name deals,” Fal said, referring to family offices increasingly skipping so-called blind-pool fund commitments, where investors hand money to a fund manager without knowing in advance which companies it will be used to back. He said a new generation of family offices is emerging, too, with a higher appetite for risk than their predecessors. “Right now, the single names they want are the AI leaders,” he said.

They definitely have the money. Family offices were overseeing $5.5 trillion in wealth as of 2024, according to a Deloitte report published that same year, which projected that number to hit at least $9.5 trillion by 2030.

Underscoring Fal’s point, they want to pour more of it into riskier, but potentially more lucrative, assets, too. UBS’s 2026 Global Family Office Report, which surveyed 307 family offices worldwide with an average net worth of $2.7 billion, found that alternative investments — including private equity, venture capital, and private credit — now make up 42% of the average family office portfolio.

Whether that’s a permanent shift or part of a familiar cycle is worth asking, though. Family offices have been here before, more than once. Direct investment activity climbed steadily through the late 2010s, for example, then spiked hard in 2021, when direct deals hit 13% of the average family office portfolio, up from 9% in 2019, according to UBS’s own tracking at the time.

Total family office deal activity peaked that year too, according to PwC’s Global Family Office Deals Study, at 17,460 deals worth roughly $1.05 trillion globally. Then it reversed just as fast, as rising interest rates and disappointing returns on some of those direct bets led many family offices to pull back. (Direct and M&A deal activity fell by 53% in just 18 months by late 2023, per PwC.) By the first half of 2025, overall family office deal volume had fallen to its lowest point in a decade.

Now it’s bouncing back, just as some would argue the market is overheated, and this time, family offices are writing bigger checks on fewer deals. Much of that activity is happening in the secondary market, which Fal calls the most “de-risked” asset in venture capital right now, since investors are often backing companies that already have customer traction and revenue proof. Angelina Hu, head of investor relations at Bridge Funding Global, put it another way: the secondary market lets family offices gain exposure to a private company without “taking exposure across 20–30 companies.”

“Family offices see the risk, but don’t want to miss the opportunity,” added Bruce K. Lee, founder of Keebeck Wealth Management.

That appetite is translating directly into Fal’s own business. He said he’s never raised this much money in his life — capital all earmarked for “AI things,” while clients who aren’t pouring money into AI are struggling to raise money at all. He said family offices currently have no problem paying “primary-style prices” for “secondary-stage risk,” even if it leaves them with “little room for outsized returns.”

Illustrating his point, Fal, whose clients primarily back climate-focused investments, said he spent the summer fielding interest from people looking to invest $50 million to $100 million into Anthropic through the secondary market. Anthropic stakes, alongside those of OpenAI, are among the most sought-after in the industry right now — what Emily Zheng, a senior VC analyst at PitchBook, described to TechCrunch as some of the “most contested real estate in venture.” Said Fal, “Even advisors with non-AI mandates are being pulled into transactions. That is where LP demand is.”

They see it as a comparatively safe investment in a volatile market. Indeed, a February report from J.P. Morgan Private Bank found that 65% of global family offices plan to “prioritize AI investments” despite concerns over inflated valuations and pricing. “Family offices are operating against a backdrop of geopolitical tensions, rising global debt levels, recession risk, and broader market uncertainty,” Maximilian Kunkel, chief investment officer of global family and institutional wealth at UBS Global Wealth Management, told TechCrunch.

Family offices clearly believe there is plenty of upside, too, in these investments. “AI is viewed as one of the most powerful long-term growth opportunities,” he continued. “The result is that investors are not choosing between resilience and growth. Instead, they are maintaining exposure to AI while diversifying across regions, currencies, and asset classes to manage concentration and macroeconomic risks.”

Whether that’s diverse enough is the big unanswered question. If the AI boom turns out to be a bubble that eventually bursts, the fallout won’t stay contained to AI stocks. As Lee put it, “everybody knows that if it goes under, the stock market’s going to have issues.” He said there are two types of investors right now: those sitting on the sideline, calling AI a bubble without owning any stock, and those who are anxious but effectively all-in. Some of his clients, he said, talk about AI being a bubble but don’t like to hear about ways to hedge against it. “We’re all addicted to returns,” he said. “That’s the sugar.”

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