Family offices stall deal-making during Iran conflict

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.

Investment firms of ultra-wealthy families dialed back their deal-making in March as the Iran conflict rattled the market.

Family offices made 39 direct investments in companies last month, a 25% drop from February when adjusted for month length, according to data provided exclusively to CNBC by Fintrx, a private wealth intelligence platform.

That said, the family offices that are still inking deals are making bold bets. A quarter of last month’s investments were part of mega-rounds, or fundraises in excess of $100 million, according to Fintrx.

In March, Jeff Bezos’ namesake family office co-led a $1.03 billion seed round for Advanced Machine Intelligence. Also known as AMI Labs, the new startup is training artificial intelligence models on real-world sensory data, rather than text.

Other boldface-name billionaires such as ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and serial entrepreneur Mark Cuban also participated in the fundraise.

This trend of making fewer but larger deals is also playing out with corporate investors.

This past quarter, the total value of global mergers and acquisitions activity rose by 26% compared with the same quarter last year to $1.2 trillion, but the number of deals fell by 17%, according to data from LSEG. The second week of March was the worst week for global M&A in over a year, falling below $33 billion, LSEG found.

However, some family offices continue to be prolific dealmakers.

In March, Indian billionaire Azim Premji’s family office made at least four direct investments in companies, according to Fintrx. Premji Invest’s largest round, which it also led, was a $450 million Series A for Rhoda AI, another startup developing novel ways to train artificial intelligence models. Rhoda AI aims to train industrial robots on hundreds of millions of videos. Kleiner Perkins billionaire John Doerr also backed the round.