Data sourced from Dakota Marketplace, the global LP and GP intelligence platform trusted by thousands of investment professionals. Learn More | Book a Demo
Family office direct investment activity is one of the most consequential capital flows in private markets and one of the hardest to track.
Dakota Marketplace solves that by sourcing, verifying, and standardizing transaction data across thousands of family offices globally, so fund managers can see where conviction is actually moving.
In August 2026, Dakota tracked 60 direct investments worldwide totaling $10.1B in disclosed transaction value. Crosstown Capital Partners, LLC was the most active family office by disclosed deals, claiming three transactions during the month.
The list below ranks the month's most significant transactions by deal size, sourced from Dakota Marketplace's family office investment data.
Top 10 Family Office Direct Investments
1. Premji Invest | $5B | Software
Premji Invest, the family office of Wipro founder Azim Premji, participated in Databricks' $5B strategic funding round at a $190B valuation, led by existing investor Coatue. The round comes as Databricks crossed a $7B revenue run-rate with more than 80% year-over-year growth in its second quarter, and will fund continued development of Lakebase, its serverless Postgres database for AI agents, Genie, its AI coworker for business data, and Unity AI Gateway, its multi-AI governance and cost-control platform.
2. Claridge, Inc | $1.5B | Electronic Equipment, Instruments & Components
Claridge, Inc, the family office of the Bronfman family, saw D-Fend Solutions, the counter-drone technology company it backed, acquired by Motorola Solutions for $1.5B. D-Fend's non-kinetic RF cyber-takeover technology is deployed by government, public safety, and enterprise customers across more than 30 countries, with 2026 revenue expected to reach $185M on more than 50% annual growth over the past three years. The deal, which closes in Q4 2026 pending regulatory approval, strengthens Motorola's airspace security offerings as counter-drone demand accelerates under the newly enacted Safer Skies Act.
3. Thomvest Ventures | $700M | Semiconductors & Semiconductor Equipment
Thomvest Ventures participated in Lumilens' $700M Series C, part of a round that brought the AI data center connectivity company's total funding to more than $900M at a $5.51B valuation. Lumilens designs optical interconnects addressing two bottlenecks in AI infrastructure: the scale-out fabric linking racks of GPUs and the scale-up fabric connecting GPUs within a single rack, where copper connections hit a physical limit of about a meter and a half. The company emerged from stealth already shipping product into a major hyperscaler's production data centers under a multi-billion-dollar customer agreement, less than two years after its founding.
4. Thiel Capital, LLC | $700M | Semiconductors & Semiconductor Equipment
Thiel Capital participated in Etched's $700M Series D at a $21B valuation, a round led by Jane Street that also marked Jane Street's debut as Etched's first customer. Etched builds frontier inference clusters powered by Low Voltage Inference and Cluster Scale Memory technology, and has now secured more than $1B in customer contracts across frontier AI companies and clouds. The round follows a rapid run for the three-year-old company: first-pass silicon success, a stealth launch in June with a working chip, a Series C weeks later at the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led round, and now a doubled valuation alongside its first production deployment.
5. LTS Investments | $400M | Software
LTS Investments participated in Lovable's $400M Series C at a $13.3B valuation, a round led by Menlo Ventures and co-led by EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund. The round broadened Lovable's global investor base with new participants spanning Europe, Latin America, and Asia, alongside returning backers including Accel, CapitalG, and Salesforce Ventures. Lovable builds a software creation platform aimed at letting people closest to a problem build the tools to solve it, positioning the company as a place where users can create and transform businesses directly.
Dakota Marketplace tracks direct investment activity from family offices across every sector in this list, with deal-level detail on stage, round size, co-investors, and portfolio companies. If you're raising capital and want to know which family offices are already investing in your sector, see it here.
6. Bluecrest Capital Management | $250M | Financial Services
Bluecrest Capital Management participated in Moove's $250M Series C at a $2.1B valuation, led by Mubadala Investment Company and co-led by Toyota's Woven Capital and Ion Pacific. Moove is building the infrastructure layer for autonomous mobility — fleet ownership, robotics-first "Nest" depots, and 24/7 operations — extending a model it has run for human-driven ride-hail since 2020 across roughly 42,000 vehicles in 29 cities. Through its partnership with Waymo, Moove already operates as a leading third-party autonomous fleet manager in Phoenix and Miami, with London confirmed as its next market.
7. Thiel Capital, LLC | $250M | Aerospace & Defense
Thiel Capital also backed Neros Technologies' $250M Series C at a $2.5B valuation, co-led by Sequoia Capital and the American Strategic Technology Fund. Neros builds mass-manufactured small drones, including Archer AI, an FPV platform with autonomy features like GPS-denied position hold, and Bandit, a counter-UAS interceptor targeting Class 2 and 3 drone threats. The round accelerates Neros toward its goal of one million drones per year, with both new platforms slated for combat deployment by the end of 2026 — this is Thiel Capital's second appearance in this month's list, alongside its stake in Etched.
8. Pontegadea Inversiones | $202M | Residential REITs
Pontegadea Inversiones, the family office of Inditex founder Amancio Ortega, paid £150M ($202M) for a residential rental development at 219 Baker St. in London's Marylebone neighborhood, with flats renting for £7,275 to £9,850 per month. The purchase follows Ortega's €800M acquisition of the Capital 8 business center in Paris in July and continues a broader shift toward residential real estate alongside his traditionally office-, retail-, and hotel-heavy European portfolio. Pontegadea funds its acquisitions through the roughly €3.2B in annual dividends Ortega collects from his controlling stake in Inditex.
9. Bezos Expeditions & Milky Way Investments | $188M | Biotechnology
Bezos Expeditions and Milky Way Investments, the family offices of Jeff Bezos and LifeMine co-founder/chairman Rick Klausner respectively, participated in LifeMine Therapeutics' $188M Series E, part of an oversubscribed round led by Milky Way that brought the company's total capital raised to $263M. LifeMine is developing LIFE-001, a novel calcineurin activation inhibitor designed to prevent organ transplant rejection without the renal, metabolic, and cardiovascular toxicities of legacy drugs like tacrolimus and cyclosporine — a Phase 1 trial in more than 120 participants has shown no clinically meaningful safety signals to date. Proceeds will fund LifeMine's planned Phase 2 kidney transplant study and Phase 1b islet cell transplant study.
10. Emerson Collective LLC | $150M | Software
Emerson Collective, The Olayan Group, and Temerty Group all participated in Emerald AI's oversubscribed $150M Series A at a $1.05B valuation, co-led by Energize Capital and DCVC. Emerald AI turns data centers into flexible grid assets that dynamically adjust power consumption based on grid conditions, an approach the company says could unlock more than 100 gigawatts of capacity on the existing U.S. grid — its technology is already deployed commercially at multi-megawatt, full data center scale across five global demonstrations. The round brings Emerald AI's total funding to more than $220M and includes 12 Fortune Global 500 companies among its investors.
Turn Family Office Transaction Data Into Your Prospect List
Family office direct investments happen largely outside public view. There is no mandatory disclosure, no regulatory filing, no database built by a government body. What family offices do with their capital has historically been invisible to the fund managers trying to reach them.
Dakota Marketplace's family office investment data changes that.
Every record reflects an actual transaction that closed, not a survey response about investment intentions. What family offices do with their capital is more reliable than what they say about it, and Dakota tracks the former. The database is continuously updated as new transactions are identified and verified by Dakota's research team, so your market view always reflects current activity. Filter by sector, stage, deal size, geography, or co-investor to identify the family offices already deploying capital in your strategy.
The families writing direct checks in your sector today are the fund commitments you should be sourcing for next quarter. Talk to an expert here.
