You can feel a shift. Over the past few years, family offices have, on average, moved from preservation mode to growth mode. More money into alternatives, more direct deals, whether done alone or alongside other families.

But actually tracking these family office investment has always been difficult.

Single family offices only serve their own family, so they sit outside SEC investment adviser registration. They don't have to tell anyone what they buy.

The emergence of private wealth data providers like FINTRX have made it easier though.

FINTRX marketing head Rich Donnellan says, “We track family office direct investment activity using a combination of AI-driven data collection and a dedicated human research team, pulling from public filings, news, and proprietary research to link each deal back to the office's broader profile.”

Donnellan says it’s become about more than just the data, with AI changing the game.

“For our clients, it's clear they don't just want to view this data in a dashboard. They want to plug it into their own AI tools, whether that's Claude, ChatGPT, or internal models, so their teams can query it, analyze it, and act on it directly inside the workflows they already use.”

And he sees that appetite growing. “We only see this trend continuing, which makes the first part even more important: these AI tools are only as strong as the data foundation they're built on.”

Currently FINTRX tracks over 4,600 family offices globally, a figure growing by triple digits every quarter, and they have more than 41,000 private market transaction records.

With Donnellan’s help, we pulled a near-instant data report of every family office deal that FINTRX tracked in August.

August saw family offices involved in 109 deals that totaled $16.9 billion in disclosed capital. 

Follow-on rounds, i.e. money going back into companies these offices already held, made up 27% of deal count, meaning there was far more activity in pursuing new ventures.

Five of the six largest rounds included follow-on investments: Databricks ($5.0B), Hadrian Automation ($1.37B), Base Power ($1.0B), Castelion ($800M) and Form Energy ($750M).

Note these are totals raised across all investors, not the individual family office investments as this data is rather limited.

Deal volume shows that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s multi family office a16z Perennial dominated the month, participating in 17 deals. These were also some of the largest rounds raised, worth $10.4 billion.

No one came close. YZi Labs, Changpeng Zhao's family office, ranked second by activity with 10 deals, but across only $42 million in total deal sizes means these were all small-checks.

​From a geographic perspective, US companies drew 70 deals in rounds that totaled $15.2 billion. India was the busiest market outside the US by count, 12 deals, but at only $344 million between them. International check sizes still run far smaller.

One other trend worth flagging: financial services roll-ups.

Twelve RIA acquisitions closed in August, every one at an undisclosed price. While invisible in any dollar-ranked view, these consolidations are a very real trend. This is not a surprise. RIA consolidation has been one of the busiest corners of wealth management M&A for years, driven by private equity chasing scale and steady fee income.

It makes sense that family capital is involved. Wealth Enhancement, which closed three of August's deals, runs the classic aggregator playbook: buy smaller advisors, fold them in, repeat. Prices stay hidden because nobody has to disclose them, but that doesn't make the wave any smaller.

Family offices were involved in some significant deals last month, with the Databricks round of $5 billion far the largest. Etched, the AI-chip startup, was backed by both Thiel Capital and a16z Perennial in its latest $700 million round, and across the last four months it drew four separate family office investments.

Looking at data from the last four months shows a total of 457 deals, with a16z Perennial as the consistent outlier accounting for 81 of those, more than the next eleven offices combined.

Unsurprisingly, AI is the common theme.

It appeared on 134 deals in rounds that totaled $38.9 billion over the period, more than any other tag on either count or dollars. Aeronautics also featured in rounds totaling $19.3 billion on just ten deals, an average of almost $2 billion each. Defense and hard assets are pulling serious family capital.

Single and multi-family offices did almost the same number of deals over the four months, 224 against 227. But it took 123 single-family offices to get there, against just 74 multi-family offices. MFOs are busier per office. SFOs are a long, flat tail, most showing up once or twice.

A final thought: a16z Perennial is dominating transaction recently, so family office data should be considered with and without a16z Perennial. Strip out that one firm and the multi-family office numbers look ordinary. It flatters the whole dataset.