Driven by Amazon’s overarching mission to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, the Alexa Fund — Amazon’s first dedicated venture capital program — is focused on working with a diverse and inclusive group of founders to lift up and support their voice-powered services and products. Working alongside the Alexa Fund, Alexa Startups empowers founders through focused startup programs, business development, technical support and provides access to broader Amazon resources and business infrastructure.
“The Alexa Fund really supports our voice integration with technical and engineering expertise, and so much more. It really does a beautiful job of helping people like me to get what we need inside Amazon.” — Ann Crady Weiss, CEO and cofounder, Hatch
“The support of mentors and the Alexa Next Stage program team was truly fantastic and unparalleled. It changed the way we think about our product and immensely impacted how we are building our business.” — Greta McAnany, Blue Fever cofounder
The Alexa Fund’s mission is to help companies at the forefront of voice innovation, unlocking novel use cases for voice, as well as picking up on emerging trends.
“Our mission is to invest in the most compelling startups advancing the state of the art in emerging fields of technology where ambient computing and the future of the digital consumer intersect. Voice is a great example of this intersection” said Paul Bernard, director of the Alexa Fund, who explains how they work with portfolio companies. “We want to work with exceptional mission-driven founders who share a common view on the potential of this intersection. In addition to being an investor we seek to partner with our portfolio companies and help advance their interests in working across Amazon in areas that span marketing, business development and technical concepting.”
What makes Alexa Fund and Alexa Startups different from other startup programs?
The Alexa Fund has invested in over 100 companies. Some work on machine learning algorithms or hardware to make voice assistants smarter and faster. Other companies develop consumer-facing products and services, such as companion robots, reading challenge apps, emotional support AI, or personalized fitness applications and devices. Still others work on building sustainable and smart homes, smart commuting, or connected living.
In 2020, the Alexa Fund and Alexa Startups focused its efforts on improving equity and inclusivity in the investing world and partnered with All Raise and Blavity to provide access to venture capital and accelerate success of women and underrepresented founders through Women Founders Represent pitch competition and AfroTech World participation.The Alexa Fund’s mission is to help companies at the forefront of voice innovation, unlocking novel use cases for voice, as well as picking up on emerging trends.
Building on its success, in 2021 Alexa Startups stood up a dedicated business development workforce to unlock Amazon resources and cultivate innovations with underrepresented and women founders. To scale their reach into this community of founders, they expanded sponsorship to include Women in Voice and Women in VC.
What Makes an Alexa Fund Portfolio Company?
The Alexa Fund started with a simple idea of backing the most promising startups that had a vision for voice. This idea is still central to their vision. Their goal has remained identifying startups creating new experiences with Alexa or advancing the state of the art in voice technology, and to give them the resources they need to grow their business.
As voice interaction became more important for people around the world during the pandemic, the Alexa Fund focused on investing in startups that doubled down on areas ripe for voice, AI, and frontier tech innovation. Areas such as health and wellness, future home evolution, social audio, and AI and ML tools. These are emerging technologies that could shape our future.
Alexa Fund noticed a need for personal fitness and wellness in homes and invested in Zwift. Zwift blends the fun of video games with the intensity of serious training, helping users get faster.
In future home evolution, Alexa Fund knew that homes are getting smarter from an infrastructure perspective and invested in Span. Span is developing smart electrical panels which adds modern interoperability with solar, EV charging and battery backup, and adding intelligence to inform insights and smart load management.
With AI/ML tools in high demand, Alexa Fund invested in Fiddler. Fiddler is a developer of tools that provide explainability and bias, fairness, and enabling businesses to analyze, manage and deploy their machine learning models to scale.
Looking into the future, the Alexa Fund is planning to expand these efforts of engaging and supporting a broader startup community, providing access to Alexa and Amazon resources. It seeks out founders who are passionate about their customers, and who build companies with a mission to enhance human wellbeing and enjoyment in such areas as health and wellness, sustainability, energy efficiency, and home automation.