For the wealthy families who manage their own money through a family office, the math right now is simple, according to Djoann Fal, a family office advisor and investor at the private wealth platform Atlas Capital in San Francisco. A family office might want to put money into something like green energy for the long haul. But in the current environment, if a fund manager offers a deal that could triple an investor’s money over three years, and another deal could triple it in three months, the choice is easy.
As Fal put it: If they have one deal that has the chance to make them 3x in three years, and another deal that could make them 3x in one quarter, “they’re just going to invest in the AI deal that does 3x in 3 months.” It isn’t surprising that family offices want in on the action, given that everything around AI is so hot right now, from valuations to pricing to the potential for returns. A bigger shift is that they no longer necessarily want to invest the traditional way, through a venture capital fund manager. Instead, family offices are increasingly buying existing shares in a private company from existing shareholders, or making direct deals on their own.
Both approaches get them exposure to the hottest companies without having to hand over control of their money to a fund manager for a decade. He said a new generation of family offices is emerging, too, with a higher appetite for risk than their predecessors. They definitely have the money.
Family offices were overseeing $5.5 trillion in wealth as of 2024, according to a Deloitte report published that same year, which projected that number to hit at least $9.5 trillion by 2030. Underscoring Fal’s point, they want to pour more of it into riskier, but potentially more lucrative, assets, too. UBS’s 2026 Global Family Office Report, which surveyed 307 family offices worldwide with an average net worth of $2.7 billion, found that alternative investments — including private equity, venture capital, and private credit — now make up 42% of the average family office portfolio.
Whether that’s a permanent shift or part of a familiar cycle is worth asking, though. Family offices have been here before, more than once. Direct investment activity climbed steadily through the late 2010s, for example, then spiked hard in 2021, when direct deals hit 13% of the average family office portfolio, up from 9% in 2019, according to UBS’s own tracking at the time.
Total family office deal activity peaked that year too, according to PwC’s Global Family Office Deals Study, at 17,460 deals worth roughly $1.05 trillion globally. Then it reversed just as fast, as rising interest rates and disappointing returns on some of those direct bets led many family offices to pull back. (Direct and M&A deal activity fell by 53% in just 18 months by late 2023, per PwC.) By the first half of 2025, overall family office deal volume had fallen to its lowest point in a decade. Now it’s bouncing back, just as some would argue the market is overheated, and this time, family offices are writing bigger checks on fewer deals.
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