Family office direct investment activity declined 13% month over month in February, but the underlying pace of transactions stayed strong. Activity during the month mirrored a key finding in the recently published Dakota Global Family Office Report, namely that families are heavily leaning into select themes including artificial intelligence and deep tech, with sustained momentum across the industrials sector.
According to Dakota Marketplace data, family offices participated in 47 deals in February, down from 54 in the first month of 2026. Even as the deal count decreased, the aggregate disclosed value of the transactions in which they participated surged to $34.7B in February from $5.1B the month prior. That leap in deal value in February was driven by the participation of David Tepper’s Appaloosa Management in a $30B growth equity round for AI giant Anthropic.
“AI and health innovation continue to be a central focus area, with energy transition and deep tech rising,” according to the Dakota report. While software mega-deals capture the most attention, family offices are actively targeting the physical world, with industrials remaining the second-largest sector by transaction volume over the last three months.
Family offices were most active in the technology sector in February, participating in 17 transactions. Activity was heavily concentrated in AI infrastructure and enterprise software. Notable family office investments included Arena Private Wealth leading a $230M Series B round for Positron AI, a technology company focusing on purpose-built hardware solutions to accelerate AI inference workloads. Arena is a Chicago-based multifamily office catering to high-net-worth investors that specializes in alternative investments and capital solutions for its wealthy clients. Elsewhere, Eric Schmidt’s Hillspire participated in a $150M Series B round for Goodfire, a public-benefit AI interpretability company building tools to reveal and modulate hidden neural network behavior.
Industrials ranked as the second-most active sector by volume, recording 12 transactions, as family offices prioritized strategic positioning in hard tech and physical infrastructure. Emerson Collective, the investment and philanthropy firm founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, participated in the largest family-office-backed industrials deal, a $1B Series C round for World Labs, a spatial intelligence AI firm developing Large World Models to understand and engage with the 3D environment. Sparta Group LLC, the family office of Sycamore Networks co-founder Gururaj "Desh” Deshpande, participated in an $860M Series D round for Stoke Space Technologies, which is creating reusable rockets for the satellite industry to offer on-demand orbital access.
The largest family-office-backed deals during the month included large-scale strategic buyouts with deep exposure to international infrastructure. French billionaire Xavier Niel’s NJJ Holding anchored this outsized activity in closing a $1.2B strategic acquisition of Telefonica’s Chilean business. The transaction secured a majority stake in the telecommunications and fixed-line provider.
The Boël family’s Sofina participated in the largest healthcare deal, investing in a $210M Series D round for Talkiatry, which provides comprehensive virtual and in-person psychiatric care powered by proprietary patient-matching algorithms. Emerson Collective also anchored a $100M Series D round for Midi Health, a virtual platform dedicated to supporting women's well-being and symptom management during midlife.
Emerson Collective was founded in 2004 by Laurene Powell Jobs, the wife of the late Steve Jobs, as the single-family office and impact LLC of the Powell Jobs family. Based in Palo Alto, CA, the organization was structured to combine philanthropy, impact investing, advocacy and storytelling under one roof. The firm has backed numerous high-profile media and technology companies, including a majority stake in The Atlantic and investments in Axios, Gimlet Media, WaitWhat, Boom Supersonic and Anonymous Content.
Emerson oversees a significant family fortune with assets totaling more than $28B. The firm operates at the intersection of impact investing and policy solutions, aiming to address complex social challenges across education, immigration reform, the environment, media and health. In 2023, Emerson spun out Yosemite as a standalone entity focused on investments in the oncology ecosystem. At the end of January, Yosemite announced it had raised more than $200M for its second fund and is ultimately seeking to raise a total of $350M.
Founder and President Laurene Powell Jobs is an entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded College Track and the XQ Institute. She serves as board chair of The Atlantic, Chicago CRED and Elemental Impact.
Managing Director Brad Powell oversees Emerson’s financial and investment activity, directing diligence work, coordinating research, and advising the firm’s portfolio companies. He is based in Aspen, CO, and has been with Emerson since 2012.
Partner and acting CTO Armen Berjikly joined Emerson in February 2025 from BetterUp, where he was CTO and before that head of product. His areas of investment focus include early stage AI-native startups, with a particular interest in AI as co-worker, AI memory, physical AI and robotics, and AI governance and infrastructure.
Managing Director Steve McDermid focuses on growth stage technology investments. He joined Emerson in August 2017, moving from Andreessen Horowitz, where he was a partner in corporate development. Before that he spent more than a decade in investment banking roles at Stifel, Thomas Weisel Partners, and Citigroup.
Managing Director Fern Mandelbaum focuses on venture investments at Emerson. A lecturer in management at Stanford for more than 20 years, Mandelbaum was a partner and co-founder of Vista Venture Partners and has been with Emerson since 2019.