Eric Schmidt is a former Google CEO whose AI investing is associated with vehicles including Hillspire and Innovation Endeavors. These activities span frontier-model companies, applied deep technology and autonomy. Holdings attributed to those organizations should be distinguished from Schmidt’s personal investments.
Eric Schmidt
Individual investor
His largest known positions are frontier labs — he joined Anthropic's Series A in May 2021 and is a seed shareholder in Mistral — pairing an AI-safety ethos with a bet that capability concentration still wins.
Through SandboxAQ (quantum + AI, which he chairs), World Labs (spatial AI) and Goodfire (interpretability), Schmidt funds the research-grade layers of the stack rather than thin wrappers.
Unusual among angels, he is a prolific backer of defense technology — Rebellion Defense, White Stork and Istari — informed by his government advisory roles, treating military AI as strategically aligned with frontier capability.
Hillspire writes family-office checks of any size into later rounds; Innovation Endeavors does classic early-stage venture. Both report to the same thesis, which is why Schmidt can appear at a Mistral seed and an Anthropic growth round.
Eric Schmidt ran Google from 2001 to 2011 and served as executive chairman until 2019. He co-founded Innovation Endeavors with Dror Berman in 2010. His AI activity is concentrated: in 2022 alone 13 of his 17 startup investments (more than three-quarters) went to AI, per data shared with CNBC by Fintrx.
Disclosed positions reported in funding announcements and press coverage, spanning frontier labs, applied deep tech and defense AI.
Backed since its Series A (May 2021, US$124.62M round); a signature Hillspire/angel position through Series H (valued US$965B, 2026).
Seed shareholder (2023); one of the few non-VC names on the European champion's cap table.
Schmidt is chairman; backed from its 2022 Google spin-out through Series F (valued US$13.9B, 2026).
Post-Transformer coding lab; participated in its US$2B NVIDIA-led Series B (2025-10, US$8B) and Series C.
Fei-Fei Li's large world model company; investor through Series E (US$5B, 2026).
Backed the startup's Series A (US$2.3B valuation, 2026).
Mechanistic interpretability startup; Series B (US$1.3B, 2026).
Participated in the open-model company's 2024 recapitalization / new investment (~US$80M).
AI for financial services research; Series A (2024) through Series D (US$2B, 2026).
Participated in the US$1.3B round alongside Microsoft and NVIDIA (2023).
Backed the French lab (formerly Holistic AI) in its US$220M seed round (2024).
Character and NPC AI platform; early investor.
Positions and roles that predate or flank the AI portfolio.
Acquired a controlling stake and became CEO (2025); aerospace manufacturing with AI-heavy software.
Co-founded with Dror Berman (2010); portfolio across robotics, biotech, data and climate tech.
Backed since ~2019 through Series E (US$2B, 2024).
Elad GilElad Gil is a San Francisco-based solo investor deploying personal capital with no committee and no fund brand, letting him commit inside days. More than 250 disclosed investments make him one of the most cited individual backers of the AI cycle. His positions span model labs, AI search and vertical AI software.
Andreessen HorowitzEarly bets in models and developer tools.
Nat FriedmanNat Friedman ran GitHub as CEO through the Copilot era, then invested as one half of NFDG alongside Daniel Gross. The two-person partnership wrote some of the earliest cheques into voice, image, music and coding AI companies. Its disclosed positions include ElevenLabs, Perplexity, Suno, Cursor and Safe Superintelligence.
Two vehicles, one thesis. Hillspire, his family office, writes checks of any size into later rounds; Innovation Endeavors, the firm he co-founded with Dror Berman in 2010, does classic early-stage venture. Hence a Mistral seed shareholder position and an Anthropic line held through the US$965B Series H — the same AI conviction expressed at both ends of the capital structure.
Series A, May 2021: a US$124.62M round — years before Menlo's 2023 pre-product entry, Lightspeed's 2024 Series D lead, or Sequoia's 2026 arrival at a US$380B valuation. The H round he held through raised US$65B, roughly 500x that Series A cheque — which is what being the earliest big-name individual backer on this site's Anthropic pages is worth in sequencing terms.
A decade chairing the US National Security Commission on AI shaped it. Rebellion Defense, White Stork and Istari put military AI in a solo investor's book — a lane funds like a16z (American Dynamism) and General Catalyst (Anduril since 2017) pursue institutionally, but which Schmidt treats as strategically continuous with frontier capability, informed by the government advisory roles behind the portfolio.
Both — he chairs it. Backed from its 2022 Google spin-out through a Series F at a US$13.9B valuation (2026), SandboxAQ sits in the 'own the hard science layer' pattern alongside World Labs and Goodfire, where Schmidt funds research-grade work he also helps govern. Relativity Space is the same overlap taken further: controlling stake acquired, then the CEO seat in 2025.
That the concentration predated the ChatGPT rush: per Fintrx data shared with CNBC, more than three-quarters of his 2022 startup investments were AI, and Hillspire has made 22 private AI investments since 2019. A family office moving that early — Anthropic's Series A in 2021, Mistral's seed in 2023 — outran most dedicated AI funds on timing alone.
They may face different customers, deployment conditions and routes to commercialization. The common AI label does not make a research spinout's milestones comparable to a defense supplier's contracts. Read each company's business and the role of Schmidt's associated vehicle before combining their narratives.