# Hillspire [[Eric Schmidt]]'s family office — the financial hub of his post-Google empire and the connective tissue between his AI investment portfolio, his defense ventures, and his policy operations. Reported to manage roughly **$15 billion**, primarily derived from Schmidt's Alphabet equity. Hillspire matters to this knowledge base less as an investment firm than as a **map of how one person's capital, policy influence, and weapons production interlock**. Every arm of the Schmidt operation routes through or around it. ## The AI Portfolio - **January 2025** — CNBC reported Hillspire had invested in **22 private AI companies since 2019**, participating in funding rounds totaling more than **$5 billion** — one of the largest individual AI bets in the world. - **2025** — Hillspire made **15 direct investments**, most in AI, earning the **#1 spot on CNBC's inaugural "Family Office 15"** ranking (February 2026) of the most active investment firms of the ultra-wealthy. - **Known holdings** include [[Anthropic]], [[SandboxAQ]], [[Rebellion Defense]], Reflection AI (ex-DeepMind founders building an open-source frontier lab — later one of the seven companies cleared for Pentagon classified networks in May 2026), Gradium (voice AI spun out of France's Kyutai lab), Goodfire (AI interpretability), and Magic (AI coding, $320M round Schmidt led in 2024). The portfolio spans the full AI stack — models, infrastructure, applications — and overlaps heavily with the sectors Schmidt's NSCAI recommendations directed government money toward. ## The Weapons Conduit Hillspire is the ownership channel for Schmidt's drone company: the chain runs **Schmidt → Hillspire → Volya Robotics OÜ (Tallinn, [[Estonia]]) → [[White Stork]] / Swift Beat**. A family office holding a foreign shell company that owns a weapons manufacturer supplying an active war — with no public-market disclosure obligations at any link in the chain. This is the structural innovation worth understanding: family offices are among the least-regulated capital vehicles in American finance, and Hillspire shows they can quietly own arms production. ## The Broader Schmidt Complex Hillspire sits alongside, and intertwines with, Schmidt's other vehicles: - **[[Schmidt Sciences]] / AI2050** — The philanthropy arm; funds AI research fellows (including [[Dan Hendrycks]], who co-authored Superintelligence Strategy with Schmidt). - **SCSP** (Special Competitive Studies Project) — The privatized NSCAI successor think tank that keeps Schmidt's framework at the center of Washington AI policy. - **America's Frontier Fund** — Schmidt-founded VC for "critical technologies" that receives government funding. - **Bolt Data & Energy** — Schmidt's AI data-center infrastructure play (January 2026, with Texas Pacific Land Corporation), extending the empire into energy. The pattern across all of it: policy vehicles define national priorities; Hillspire and adjacent funds own the companies that fulfill them. See [[Defense Tech Conflicts of Interest]] and [[Revolving Door]]. ## See Also - [[Eric Schmidt]] — Principal; full conflicts-of-interest map - [[White Stork]] — The weapons company at the end of the ownership chain - [[SandboxAQ]] — Portfolio company Schmidt also chairs - [[Anthropic]] — Largest-profile AI holding - [[Rebellion Defense]] — Defense AI holding - [[Defense Tech Conflicts of Interest]] - [[Defense Tech Ecosystem]]