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 May 2026, Dakota tracked 53 direct investments worldwide totaling $79.44B in disclosed transaction value.
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. Dubai Holding LLC | $6.5B | Real Estate
Dubai Holding, the investment vehicle of Dubai's ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, acquired a 22.27% stake in Emaar Properties from the Investment Corporation of Dubai, bringing its total ownership in the developer to 29.73%. Emaar is behind some of Dubai's most recognizable landmarks, including the Burj Khalifa and the Dubai Mall. The transaction effectively consolidates control of one of the emirate's most strategically important corporate assets under the ruler's direct purview.
2. Lupa Systems | $300M+ | Media
Lupa Systems, the media and technology holding company of James Murdoch, agreed to acquire New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and Vox from Vox Media in a deal valued at more than $300M. The acquisition adds New York Magazine and its six editorial verticals, along with one of the largest U.S. podcast networks, to a portfolio that already includes Art Basel and Tribeca Enterprises. The new entity will operate as a Lupa subsidiary called Vox Media, led by Vox Media co-founder Jim Bankoff as CEO.
3. Yamauchi No.10 Family Office | $300M | Software
Yamauchi No. 10 Family Office, the investment vehicle of the family behind Nintendo, joined a $300M funding round for Decart, a frontier AI research lab building real-time world models and the infrastructure to power them. The round was led by Radical Ventures and included NVIDIA, Sequoia Capital, and Benchmark among other investors. Decart's optimization stack currently serves trillions of tokens daily for clients including Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.
4. Pritzker Organization | $145M | Health Care Technology
The Pritzker Organization's 1902 Capital participated in a $145M transaction for Vi Labs (Vi), an enterprise AI platform serving the health care, life sciences, and wellness industries. The deal valued Vi at $1.64B and comprised both primary and secondary capital. Vi serves more than 100 large-scale enterprise customers, supports over 190 million lives, and has helped bring more than 50 drugs to market.
5. Thiel Capital, LLC | $140M | Independent Power and Renewable Electricity Producers
Thiel Capital and Foris Ventures co-led a $140M Series B for Panthalassa, a Portland, Oregon-based renewable energy and ocean technology company building autonomous, floating systems that generate power from ocean waves to run AI computing infrastructure at sea. Peter Thiel led the round, with participation from John Doerr, Marc Benioff's TIME Ventures, Max Levchin's SciFi Ventures, and others. Panthalassa plans to deploy its Ocean-3 pilot node series in the northern Pacific Ocean in 2026 ahead of commercial deployments in 2027.
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. Ponte Ter | $134M | Hotels, Restaurants, & Leisure
Ponte Ter, the investment vehicle of the Costa family led by Giuseppe Costa, partnered with Nextalia Private Equity to acquire Costa Edutainment, the leading Italian operator of aquariums, theme parks, and experience museums. Ponte Ter will retain a 30% stake in the new shareholding structure, ensuring continuity of the founding family's vision. Costa Edutainment manages 12 facilities across Italy, welcomed approximately 3 million visitors in 2025, and generated roughly $82M in revenue.
7. WTT Investment | $100M | Software
WTT Investment participated in RadixArk's $100M seed round, which also included Accel, Spark Capital, and NVIDIA's venture arm NVentures. RadixArk was founded by the creators of SGLang, the open-source inference engine serving trillions of tokens daily across Google, Microsoft, xAI, and others. The company is building an end-to-end AI infrastructure platform covering training, fine-tuning, and inference at scale.
8. Meetperry Venture | $100M | Marine Transportation
Meetperry participated in Havoc's $100M Series A, which brings the all-domain collaborative autonomy company's total capital raised to approximately $200M since 2024. Havoc builds software-defined hardware enabling a single operator to supervise thousands of autonomous assets across sea, air, and land. The company has delivered more than 30 vessels to the U.S. Department of Defense and has deployed over 100 autonomous surface vessels globally.
9. Sofina SA | $100M | Financial Services
Sofina led Primer's $100M Series C, an oversubscribed round that also included Peak XV Partners and existing investors ICONIQ, Accel, Tencent, and Balderton. Primer provides unified payments infrastructure for global enterprises, processing billions of transactions annually for brands including GetYourGuide and Dialpad. The new capital will fund expansion of Primer's AI payments capabilities and accelerate its push into the U.S. market, where the company targets growing U.S. revenue to more than a third of total revenue by 2028.
10. Emerson Collective LLC | $64M | Electric Utilities
Emerson Collective, the investment and philanthropic vehicle of Laurene Powell Jobs, participated in GridCARE's $64M Series A, an oversubscribed round led by Sutter Hill Ventures that also included John Doerr and utility strategics National Grid Partners and Future Energy Ventures. GridCARE has pioneered a new category it calls Power Acceleration, using physics-based AI to activate latent grid capacity and compress interconnection timelines from years to months. The company has already generated more than $10B in economic value for data center developers by bringing hundreds of megawatts online ahead of schedule.
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.
