Billionaire family offices bet on drones, nuclear energy in August

Published Thu, Sep 4 20257:30 AM EDTUpdated Thu, Sep 4 20257:37 AM EDT

Hayley Cuccinello @in/hayleycuccinello/@HCuccinello

Key Points

Billionaire family offices inked high-profile investments in an otherwise slow month for deal-making, according to Fintrx.
Four billionaires' private investment firms joined an $863 million fundraise for a nuclear fusion startup.
Peter Thiel, a longtime investor in defense tech, backed a German drone maker as other high-net-worth investors flock to the sector.

A version of this article first appeared in CNBC's Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox. For investment firms of the ultra wealthy, deal-making held steady in August. Family offices made 47 direct investments in companies, nearly flat from July's 48 , per data provided exclusively to CNBC by Fintrx. Tariff anxieties continue to weigh on family office deal-making, which sunk in August by nearly 50% on a year-over-year basis, according to the private wealth intelligence platform. That said, family offices of the world's richest people came out swinging in August. The firms of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, hedge fund billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller and philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs joined an $863 million fundraise for Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Bill Gates' venture capital firm, Gates Frontier, was also an investor in the nuclear fusion startup's Series B2 round. While deal-making is on the decline, nuclear energy firms are attractive to family offices looking to tap into the artificial intelligence boom, which will require immense power. Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective was also part of a $314 million fundraise for robotics startup FieldAI . Jeff Bezos' namesake family office co-led the round for the Irvine, California-based startup, which enables robots to learn and navigate physical environments like construction sites. In August, Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel joined a $62 million fundraise for Stark, a German developer of weaponized drones. His family office, Thiel Capital, has backed Quantum Systems, another German drone manufacturer, since at least 2022. Thiel has a long track record of funding defense tech firms through Thiel Capital and Founders Fund, the venture capital firm he runs, including Palmer Luckey's Anduril . He also co-founded the controversial AI software maker Palantir which has contracts with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement , the U.S. Army and the Internal Revenue Service. "A.I. is a military technology," Thiel wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 2019. "Forget the sci-fi fantasy; what is powerful about actually existing A.I. is its application to relatively mundane tasks like computer vision and data analysis." Six years later, more deep-pocketed investors have warmed to defense tech startups. Once shunned by investors who were drawn to an environmental, social and governance lens, defense assets have surged in popularity in light of geopolitical turmoil and pledges by Germany and other European Union members to ramp up defense spending. In June, Spotify founder Daniel Ek's venture capital firm led a 600 million euro ($698.96 million) round for Munich-founded defense tech firm Helsing . Last month, the holding company of the billionaire family behind Volkswagen and Porsche announced it was seeking co-investors for a VC fund dedicated to European defense startups. To that end, Porsche SE shared plans to host a "Defense Day" networking event for European and German family offices. Venture capital investment in defense tech hit $19.1 billion in the second quarter of 2025, a 200% annual increase, according to PitchBook.