Eric Schmidt family office invests in Goodfire

Hillspire, the single-family office of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, has participated in Goodfire‘s $150 million Series B financing, announced on February 5, 2026. The round, which valued the company at $1.25 billion — catapulting it into unicorn territory less than a year after its Series A — was led by B Capital, with participation from existing investors Juniper Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, South Park Commons, and Wing Venture Capital, and new investors DFJ Growth and Salesforce Ventures. Goodfire is a San Francisco–based AI research lab and public benefit corporation focused on interpretability — the science of reverse-engineering how neural networks work internally and using those insights to intentionally design, debug, and improve AI models. Led by CEO Eric Ho, the company’s team includes researchers drawn from DeepMind, OpenAI, Harvard, and Stanford, among them co-founder Tom McGrath (who founded the interpretability team at Google DeepMind) and Nick Cammarata (a core contributor to OpenAI’s seminal interpretability team). Goodfire has built a “model design environment” — a platform that allows users to reach inside AI models, identify the internal components responsible for specific behaviors, and precisely retrain or intervene on those subunits. One application of its methods reduced hallucinations by half in a large language model. In the life sciences, Goodfire applied interpretability techniques to an epigenetic model built by partner Prima Mente and identified a novel class of Alzheimer’s biomarkers — described as the first major finding in the natural sciences obtained from reverse-engineering a foundation model. The company has also partnered with Mayo Clinic, Arc Institute, and Microsoft. The Series B proceeds will fund frontier research, the next generation of Goodfire’s core product, and the scaling of partnerships across AI agents and life sciences. Goodfire has raised more than $200 million to date.

About Hillspire: The Schmidt family office

Hillspire is the single-family office of Eric Schmidt and Wendy Schmidt, managing the couple’s personal wealth, investments, and philanthropic activities. Eric Schmidt, born in 1955 in Falls Church, Virginia, holds a BS in electrical engineering from Princeton University and both an MS and PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. He served as CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, a period during which the company grew from a startup with roughly 200 employees to a global technology giant generating over $29 billion in annual revenue. He subsequently served as executive chairman of Google (2011–2015) and Alphabet (2015–2017), and remained a technical advisor to the company until 2020. Schmidt’s net worth is estimated at approximately $20–25 billion, derived primarily from his Google/Alphabet equity. Hillspire — named after the Schmidts’ residence in Atherton, California — has been among the most active family offices in AI investing. In 2025, CNBC’s Family Office 15 ranked Hillspire as the most active direct-investing family office in the United States, having made 15 investments in the year, predominantly in artificial intelligence. Recent portfolio activity includes investments in Gradium (a Paris-based voice AI startup spun out of French AI lab Kyutai), Reflection AI (an open-source AI startup founded by two former Google DeepMind researchers), and a fusion energy company, alongside the Goodfire position. Schmidt has been a prominent public evangelist for AI technology, co-authoring “The Age of AI” with Henry Kissinger, and funding the AI-focused nonprofit Special Competitive Studies Project. Beyond Hillspire, Wendy Schmidt is president and co-founder of the Schmidt Family Foundation. The couple’s philanthropy includes the Schmidt Ocean Institute and significant contributions to Princeton, UC Berkeley, and the Broad Institute. Schmidt also served as chairman of the Defense Innovation Board and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, and is currently executive chairman of Relativity Space, the 3D-printed rocket manufacturer.

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Article Source: IFC Review, 06.03.2026