Gemini co-founders Tyler Winklevoss and Cameron Winklevoss attend the company’s IPO on the Nasdaq Marketsite on September 12, 2025 in New York City, USA.
Gina Moon | Reuters
A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter by Robert Frank, a weekly guide for high-net-worth investors and consumers. Sign up to receive future editions directly to your inbox.
The final quarter of the year is not off to a bright start, with ultra-wealthy investment firms cutting back on trading throughout 2025. Family offices made 51 direct investments in October, down 63% on an annual basis, according to data provided exclusively to CNBC by private wealth platform Fintrx.
But family offices are still helping raise huge sums of money for artificial intelligence companies.
Last month, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss’ namesake investment firm participated in Crusoe’s $1.4 billion Series E round, valuing the data center developer at $10 billion. Hillspire, his former family officegoogle CEO Eric Schmidt participated in a $2 billion Series B round for Reflection, an open source AI modeling lab currently valued at $8 billion.
Family office investors have also been involved in previous headline-grabbing rounds, including Commonwealth Fusion’s $863 million Series B2 financing. The power plant developer round announced in August included participation from Hillspire, Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective and Stanley Druckenmiller’s Duquesne Family Office.
A recent report from PwC found that while family office stakes have declined, they haven’t worsened in large rounds.
According to PwC, family office deals fell by 23% in the first half of 2025, but their value only fell by 18% on an annual basis. The share of family office transactions over $100 million remained unchanged at 15%, while deals over $500 million decreased by just 1 percentage point to 3%.
Super-large rounds in AI companies helped support deal values. In the first half of this year, family offices made about the same number of investments in AI and machine learning as they did during the same period in 2023, but transaction value nearly tripled to $123.3 billion, according to PwC.
But even before the AI wave arrived, family offices tended to prioritize larger deals, according to the consulting firm. Over the past decade, the share of investments under $25 million has shrunk from 70% to 59%. Deals between $25 million and $100 million now account for 26%, an increase of 6 percentage points from 2015, and the share of deals over $100 million increased from 9% to 15%.
The consultancy’s report attributed this trend to family offices seeking greater profits and “increasing their ambitions as major players in the world of global trading.”
