Family offices are shifting billions into direct AI deals

Wealthy families that manage their own money through family offices are pouring more capital directly into AI, and increasingly skipping the traditional venture-fund route to do it, according to Djoann Fal, a family office advisor and investor at private wealth platform Atlas Capital in San Francisco. Fal said family offices are choosing single-company AI deals over longer-horizon bets like green energy because the return timeline is so much shorter: a deal that could triple an investor’s money in three months beats one that takes three years. Instead of handing money to a venture fund manager for a decade through “blind-pool” commitments, family offices are increasingly buying existing shares from current shareholders on the secondary market or striking direct deals themselves — gaining exposure to sought-after companies without ceding control of their capital.

They have the capital to do it: family offices were overseeing $5.5 trillion in wealth as of 2024, according to a Deloitte report from that year, which projected the figure would hit at least $9.5 trillion by 2030. 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 shift is permanent or part of a familiar cycle is worth asking. Direct investment activity climbed through the late 2010s and spiked in 2021, when direct deals hit 13% of the average family office portfolio, up from 9% in 2019, per UBS’s own tracking at the time; total family office deal activity that year peaked at roughly 17,460 deals worth about $1.05 trillion globally, according to PwC’s Global Family Office Deals Study. Rising interest rates and disappointing returns then reversed the trend, with direct and M&A deal activity falling 53% in 18 months by late 2023, per PwC — pulling overall family office deal volume down to its lowest point in a decade by the first half of 2025. It is now bouncing back, with family offices writing bigger checks on fewer deals, much of it in the secondary market. Fal said he spent the summer fielding interest from people looking to invest $50 million to $100 million into Anthropic through the secondary market, calling Anthropic and OpenAI stakes among the most sought-after in the industry. 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.

Why it matters

The shift toward direct AI deals concentrates family-office capital and risk in a small set of private AI companies, which means that if the AI boom turns out to be a bubble, the fallout will not stay contained to public AI stocks.