Bernard Arnault, the CEO and founder of LVMH (LVMHF), has long been associated with luxury brands and is notably the only one among the world’s richest handful who’s not from a tech background. But this year, Arnault has made several investments in A.I. startups via Aglaé Ventures, a venture capital firm backed by his family office. He’s participated in five funding rounds for A.I.-focused companies over the past eight months, totaling $300 million, as first reported by CNBC. (The amounts of Aglaé’s investments aren’t disclosed.)
The most significant startup supported by Aglaé is a French company known as H. Founded by former Google (GOOGL) DeepMind researchers and formerly known as Holistic AI, the startup raised $220 million in May from a group of investors that included Arnault and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, as well as Samsung (SSNLF) and Amazon (AMZN). Led by former Stanford researcher Charles Kantor, it aims to develop artificial general intelligence (A.G.I.), a type of A.I. that is as intelligent and efficient as humans.
In March, Arnault co-led a $27 million seed round for the Canadian startup Borderless AI, which aims to bring A.I. agents to human resources. The previous month, his firm co-led a $43 million round with Balderton Capital for the French startup Photoroom, which is developing a photo-editing platform with A.I.
When it comes to U.S.-based startups, Arnault has backed the likes of Lamini, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based company specializing in enterprise A.I. platforms. In June, the startup raised $25 million from Aglaé, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and Google Brain co-founder Andrew Ng. In April, Arnault also took part in a series A round that raised $12 million for Proxima, a New York-based data intelligence software company.
LVMH is experimenting with A.I.
LVMH, meanwhile, is currently valued at $375 billion—the largest luxury company by market cap—and has made Arnault the third wealthiest person in the world behind Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk with an estimated net worth of $190.7 billion. Despite its dominance, a pullback from shoppers amid an uncertain economic environment and slowing demand in China has hurt the company’s recent financial figures. In June, LVMH missed Wall Street expectations when it recorded revenues of 41.7 billion euros ($46 billion) for the first half of 2024, representing a 1 percent decrease year-over-year.
The luxury conglomerate, too, has experimented with emerging technologies like A.I. In 2021, it signed a five-year strategic partnership with Google Cloud to incorporate A.I. solutions into features like demand forecasting and inventory optimization. And in September last year, the company held its second-ever LVMH Data A.I. Summit and selected generative A.I. as the topic, bringing together hundreds of participants for a three-day gathering. The following month, LVMH joined a corporate affiliates program at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered A.I. that will see the company work with faculty and students to understand advances and applications of the technology.
Earlier this year, LVMH also took part in VivaTech, an annual tech trade fair in Paris that the conglomerate has been involved with since its inaugural edition in 2016. LVMH awarded seven prizes to different startups, including FancyTech, which uses generative A.I. to develop video production software, and BLNG, a company that converts sketches into visual designs with the help of the technology.
Speaking at VivaTech in May, Arnault touched upon LVMH’s long history with tech startups. “Many years ago, in the ’90s when tech started to be very successful, we invested in several startups,” he said, recalling his early investments in the likes of Google and Netflix—the latter of which was still a DVD rental company when LVMH first backed it. To stand the test of time, companies must emphasize values like creativity, quality, entrepreneurship and efficiency, according to Arnault. “Some of them made it, but many didn’t,” he said.
