Bezos Expeditions

Bezos Expeditions is Jeff Bezos Jeff BezosJeff Bezos is an American entrepreneur and investor who founded Amazon in 1994, led it as chief executive for many years, and became its executive chair in 2021. He also founded the spaceflight company Blue Origin, bought The Washington Post in 2013, and set up philanthropic funds including the Bezos Earth Fund.Open the full entry’s personal investment platform, whose public portfolio spans the internet, enterprise software, life sciences, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Its investment activity is separate from Amazon AmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry’s corporate investments, and disclosed holdings include Business Insider Business InsiderBusiness Insider is a digital business-news organization.Open the full entry, Skild AI, and Generalist.

Contents14 sections

Key facts

Personal Investment Platform and Scope

Bezos Expeditions presents part of Jeff Bezos’s personal investment activity, with holdings spanning consumer internet, enterprise services, medical technology, and frontier technology. The website also lists other interests and philanthropic projects; these links are shown separately from the selected investment portfolio and do not mean that every related organization is one of its controlled assets.⁠[1]

July 20, 2006Investing in 37signals

On July 20, 2006, the software company 37signals 37signals37signals is a software company co-founded by Jason Fried that began as a web design firm in 1999, created the project management software Basecamp and the email service HEY, and is where the web framework Ruby on Rails originated; from 2014 to 2022 the company operated under the name Basecamp.Open the full entry announced that Bezos Expeditions, Jeff Bezos’s personal investment company, had made a minority private equity investment in it. At the time 37signals had released five products, including Basecamp BasecampBasecamp is project management and team collaboration software from 37signals, combining tasks, discussions, files, and schedules in project spaces. It offers web, mobile, and desktop access; version 5 was released in 2026.Open the full entry, Backpack, and Campfire, with more than 500,000 sign-ups, and had open-sourced the Ruby on Rails Ruby on RailsRuby on Rails (often shortened to Rails) is an open-source, full-stack web application framework written in the Ruby programming language that builds database-backed web applications following the model–view–controller (MVC) pattern. Created by David Heinemeier Hansson and first publicly released in 2004, it is known for design principles such as “convention over configuration,” and companies including GitHub and Shopify use it in production.Open the full entry framework; the company said it had been approached by nearly 30 venture capital firms and turned them down because it did not need money to run the business but wanted the experience of an entrepreneur with a long-term outlook.⁠[2][2][2][2][2][2][1]

March 28, 2012Announcing the Search for the Apollo 11 F-1 Engines

On March 28, 2012, Jeff Bezos published an open letter on the Bezos Expeditions website announcing that a deep-sea team he had assembled had used state-of-the-art sonar to find, 14,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic, the F-1 rocket engines that launched Apollo 11 on July 16, 1969, and then fell into the ocean as planned, and that he planned to attempt to raise one or more of them. Bezos wrote that watching Apollo 11 on television at age five was a big contributor to his passions for science, engineering, and exploration.⁠[3][3][3][3]

Bezos noted that the engines remained the property of NASA NASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry and that the recovery was privately funded, with no public money; if an engine was recovered, he imagined NASA would make it available to the Smithsonian Smithsonian InstitutionThe Smithsonian Institution is a museum, education and research institution created by the U.S. Congress in 1846 with the bequest of the English scientist James Smithson. Based in Washington, D.C., it runs museums such as the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of Natural History, as well as the National Zoo.Open the full entry, and if more than one was raised, he had asked NASA to consider making one available to the Museum of Flight The Museum of FlightThe Museum of Flight is an independent air and space museum in Seattle, Washington, founded in 1965, whose first permanent home was the Boeing Red Barn. Since 2015 it has displayed Apollo F-1 engine remains recovered by Bezos Expeditions.Open the full entry in Seattle.⁠[3][3][3]

March 2013–December 2015Recovering F-1 Engine Components and Putting Them on Display

In an update on March 20, 2013, Bezos wrote that the team had spent three weeks at sea aboard the Seabed Worker, using remotely operated vehicles at depths of more than 14,000 feet to recover thrust chambers, gas generators, injectors, turbines, and many other components, enough to assemble displays of two flown F-1 engines; the team had been assembled by David Concannon. Because the parts had struck the ocean and corroded in seawater for decades, most of the original serial numbers were missing, making mission identification difficult.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4]

On July 19, 2013, Bezos announced that conservators at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center had found the number “2044” painted and stamped on one of the thrust chambers, corresponding to NASA number 6044, the serial number of F-1 Engine No. 5 from Apollo 11. In March 2014, the F-1 recovery team received the Citation of Merit Award from The Explorers Club The Explorers ClubThe Explorers Club is a New York-based professional society of explorers, first mentioned in 1904 and incorporated in 1905, dedicated to field research, scientific exploration and resource conservation. Its members include those behind famous firsts such as reaching the South Pole, summiting Everest and landing on the Moon.Open the full entry, presented in person by Buzz Aldrin Buzz AldrinBuzz Aldrin is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and former NASA astronaut who performed three extravehicular activities on Gemini XII in 1966 and, as Apollo 11 lunar module pilot in 1969, became the second person to walk on the Moon.Open the full entry. On December 16, 2015, Bezos announced that the first shipment of conserved F-1 artifacts had arrived at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, including artifacts from Apollo 12 and Apollo 16.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][4]

2015Business Insider Equity Arrangement

In September 2015, Axel Springer Axel SpringerAxel Springer SE is a Berlin-based media company founded in Hamburg in 1946 by the publisher Axel Springer; it owns a number of news media brands in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom, as well as commerce-related businesses.Open the full entry announced a transaction to acquire Business Insider, under which it would acquire about 88% of the shares for $343 million, bringing its stake, together with its earlier holding, to about 97%. Bezos Expeditions retained an interest of about 3%, remaining an investor after this restructuring of the digital media company’s ownership.⁠[5]

January 4, 2024Joining Perplexity’s Series B

On January 4, 2024, the AI search company Perplexity PerplexityPerplexity is a San Francisco–based artificial intelligence company founded in 2022, known for its “answer engine” that gives answers with cited sources, and it has also launched products such as the Comet browser.Open the full entry announced a $73.6 million Series B led by IVP IVPIVP (Institutional Venture Partners) is a growth-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California, founded by Reid W. Dennis in 1980; it has invested in companies including Twitter, Dropbox, Coinbase and Figma.Open the full entry, with new investors including NVIDIA NVIDIANVIDIA is an American semiconductor and computing technology company that provides graphics processing units, artificial intelligence infrastructure, networking interconnects, and computing software, and is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker NVDA.Open the full entry, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions Fund), and Tobi Lutke Tobias LütkeTobias Lütke, who also goes by Tobi Lütke, is a programmer, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Shopify, and a startup investor. He took part in the Ruby on Rails open-source community, has served as Shopify’s CEO since April 2008, and joined the board of Coinbase in 2022.Open the full entry; including earlier rounds, the company had raised $100 million to date. Perplexity then had 10 million monthly active users and had served more than half a billion queries in 2023.⁠[6][6][6][6]

February 29, 2024Joining Figure’s Series B

On February 29, 2024, the humanoid robot company Figure FigureFigure is a US AI robotics company founded by Brett Adcock in 2022. It develops general-purpose humanoid robots and the Helix control system for industrial logistics and household tasks. Its robot generations include Figure 01, Figure 02 and Figure 03, with production pilots at BMW.Open the full entry announced a $675 million Series B at a $2.6 billion valuation, with investments from Microsoft MicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry, OpenAI Startup Fund OpenAI Startup FundThe OpenAI Startup Fund is a venture fund set up by OpenAI in May 2021 with an initial $100 million from Microsoft and other partners to invest in early-stage AI companies. It had raised about $175 million by 2023, and control passed to Ian Hathaway in March 2024.Open the full entry, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), Parkway Venture Capital, Intel Capital Intel CapitalIntel Capital is the corporate venture capital arm of Intel, founded in 1991, whose investments have included VMware, MongoDB and Astera Labs; Intel announced in January 2025 that it would spin it off as a standalone fund, then decided that April to keep it.Open the full entry, Align Ventures, and ARK Invest ARK InvestARK Invest (ARK Investment Management LLC) is a U.S. investment management firm founded by Cathie Wood in 2013, known for actively managed ETFs focused on disruptive innovation such as ARK Innovation ETF; it is headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida.Open the full entry. At the same time, Figure and OpenAI OpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry entered into a collaboration agreement to develop next-generation AI models for humanoid robots.⁠[7][7]

2024Joining Skild AI’s Series A

In July 2024, Skild AI announced a $300 million Series A at a $1.5 billion valuation. Jeff Bezos, through Bezos Expeditions, co-led the round with other firms, backing the company’s development of a foundation model that can be applied across different robot embodiments.⁠[8]

The participant list for the round also separately named the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund Amazon Industrial Innovation FundThe Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund (AIIF) is a $1 billion venture investment program Amazon set up in April 2022 to invest in fulfillment, logistics and supply chain technology companies; its first five investments included Agility Robotics.Open the full entry and the Alexa Fund Alexa FundThe Alexa Fund is a corporate investment fund Amazon set up in June 2015 with up to $100 million for developers, hardware makers and startups working on voice technology. Amazon added another $100 million in 2017, and the fund later expanded into artificial intelligence, hardware and entertainment.Open the full entry. Bezos Expeditions’ personal investment and the corporate investments of Amazon’s funds were therefore distinct investors even within the same transaction.⁠[8]

September 30, 2025Jeff Bezos Joins Periodic Labs’ Seed Round

On September 30, 2025, Periodic Labs Periodic LabsPeriodic Labs is a company applying artificial intelligence to scientific research, co-founded by Liam Fedus and Ekin Dogus Cubuk.Open the full entry announced a $300 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry, with participation from Felicis FelicisFelicis (whose funds and earlier brand use the name Felicis Ventures) is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California, founded in 2006 by former Google product manager Aydin Senkut; it has invested in companies including Shopify, Canva and Adyen.Open the full entry, DST Global DST GlobalDST Global is a technology investment firm founded by Yuri Milner in 2009 that focuses on growth-stage investments in internet companies worldwide; it has invested in companies including Facebook, Twitter, Alibaba, JD.com, Airbnb and Spotify, and in 2026 led the US$400 million Series B round of the AI visual content company Higgsfield.Open the full entry, NVIDIA, Accel, and individual investors including Elad Gil, Eric Schmidt Eric SchmidtEric Schmidt is a technologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist who was Google’s chief executive officer from 2001 to 2011 and later executive chairman of Alphabet; he chaired the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and has led the rocket company Relativity Space since 2025.Open the full entry, Jeff Dean, and Jeff Bezos. The company was founded by Ekin Dogus Cubuk Ekin Dogus CubukPeriodic Labs cofounder and co-CEO, working at the intersection of machine learning and physics.Open the full entry, who led the materials and chemistry team at Google Brain Google BrainGoogle Brain was Google’s AI research team, co-founded by Jeff Dean and others in 2011. It open-sourced the TensorFlow machine learning system in 2015 and was merged with DeepMind into Google DeepMind in April 2023.Open the full entry and DeepMind Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMind is Google’s artificial intelligence research organization, formed in April 2023 by merging DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, with the Brain team from Google Research, and led by CEO Demis Hassabis. It developed AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and the Gemini family of models, and Hassabis and John Jumper received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold’s protein structure prediction work.Open the full entry, and Liam Fedus Liam FedusLiam Fedus (William Fedus) is an artificial intelligence researcher and entrepreneur who served as OpenAI’s vice president of research in charge of post-training, and in 2025 co-founded Periodic Labs with Ekin Dogus Cubuk to accelerate scientific discovery with AI.Open the full entry, former vice president of research at OpenAI, with the aim of automating scientific discovery through AI systems that learn from the literature and physical experiments. Periodic Labs is listed among the selected investments on the Bezos Expeditions website; the public announcements name Jeff Bezos as an individual and do not specify the investing entity.⁠[9][9][9][10][1]

January 2026Investing Again in Skild AI

In January 2026, Skild AI announced a new round of about $1.4 billion at a valuation of more than $14 billion, led by SoftBank SoftBank GroupSoftBank Group (SoftBank Group Corp.) is an investment holding company headquartered in Tokyo, founded by Masayoshi Son in 1981. Starting out as a distributor of personal computer software, it moved into the internet, broadband and mobile communications, and has since become an investment group centered on AI-related assets such as Arm, the SoftBank Vision Funds and OpenAI.Open the full entry, with Bezos Expeditions participating again. The company will use the funds to advance its robot intelligence systems and real-world deployments; the total size of the round is not the amount invested by Bezos Expeditions.⁠[11]

June 2026Joining Generalist’s Financing

On June 4, 2026, Generalist announced $400 million in new funding, bringing its total funding to more than $500 million. Bezos Expeditions participated again as an existing investor; the funds are for research and development of physical AI and robot models and for expanding investment in data, compute, and the team.⁠[12]

As of October 2026: Projects Listed on the Website

The website also links to Blue Origin Blue OriginBlue Origin is a private spaceflight company founded by Jeff Bezos in 2000 and headquartered in Kent, Washington. It develops the reusable suborbital rocket New Shepard, the heavy-lift launch vehicle New Glenn, the BE-4 engine and the Blue Moon lunar lander, and is one of NASA’s lunar lander providers for the Artemis program. In 2026 it took outside investment for the first time, at a valuation of more than $130 billion.Open the full entry, the Washington Post The Washington PostThe Washington Post is an American daily newspaper founded in Washington in 1877, known for its role in the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate investigation. Run by the Meyer–Graham family for eighty years from 1933, it has been owned personally by Jeff Bezos since 2013.Open the full entry, the Bezos Day One Fund Bezos Day One FundThe Bezos Day One Fund is a philanthropic fund announced by Jeff Bezos in 2018 with an initial $2 billion commitment. It comprises the Day 1 Families Fund, which makes annual grants to organizations serving homeless families, and the Day 1 Academies Fund, which runs the tuition-free, Montessori-inspired Bezos Academy preschools.Open the full entry, the Bezos Family Foundation Bezos Family FoundationThe Bezos Family Foundation is a family foundation created in 2000 by Mike and Jackie Bezos and their family. It funds learning and development for young people from birth through adolescence and runs programs including Vroom and the Bezos Scholars Program; Jackie Bezos was the mother of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.Open the full entry, the 10,000 Year Clock 10,000 Year ClockThe 10,000 Year Clock, also called the Clock of the Long Now, is a mechanical clock designed by Danny Hillis to keep time for ten thousand years as a symbol of long-term thinking. Jeff Bezos provided its site and primary funding, and it is being assembled inside a mountain in West Texas.Open the full entry, and F-1 Engine Recovery, the last of which is a section hosted on the website itself.⁠[1][4]

Public Portfolio and Disclosure Limits

The selected investments listed on the website include Airbnb, Uber, Workday WorkdayWorkday is a US enterprise software company founded in 2005 by Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield; it provides cloud applications and AI agents for HR, finance and IT, is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, and is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker WDAY.Open the full entry, Perplexity, Physical Intelligence, Figure, Anduril Anduril IndustriesAnduril Industries is a defense technology company headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, United States, co-founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and several former Palantir and Oculus employees. It develops autonomous drones, unmanned undersea vehicles, border surveillance towers, counter-drone systems, and the Lattice command-and-control software, and builds its own large-scale weapons manufacturing facilities. As of May 2026, the company was valued at $61 billion.Open the full entry, and several life sciences companies, showing a footprint across many industries. The list does not give ownership percentages, investment dates, or exit status for each company, so it is suitable for confirming historical investment relationships but cannot be used to estimate assets under management at any single point in time.⁠[1]