Boehly’s investment group rolls out AI across portfolio after taking stake in start-up

Todd Boehly’s $75bn asset-management giant Eldridge is rolling out AI across companies ranging from Chelsea Football Club to film studio A24, as investment firms race to protect portfolios at rising risk of disruption from the technology.

Businesses with “unique data, physical assets and irreplicable IP” would be best placed to weather AI, the billionaire investor told the FT, outlining a strategy he said would allow Eldridge portfolio companies to “play offence” while overhauling their own investment processes.

Chelsea is using AI to analyse football injuries in a bid to reduce players’ time spent on the sidelines, while A24 has a $75mn research partnership with Google DeepMind to explore how AI could support film-making.

“It’s going to take a lot of legwork [but] across our organisation, we’re trying to give our colleagues the tools and the skills to rethink all of their workflows,” said co-founder Tony Minella, who has been driving Eldridge’s AI strategy for the past two years.

Minella and Boehly worked together at Guggenheim Partners before founding Eldridge Industries in 2015. The group has investments in more than 100 companies spanning defence, media, finance and sports, with Boehly serving as Chelsea’s chair.

The pair’s efforts mimic those of executives at a raft of investment groups to capitalise on new tools and see off the threat from newer, nimbler businesses using AI, which have already hammered many software companies and other businesses they own.

Rival investment groups have forged ties with leading AI developers in an effort to spread AI across portfolio companies. Blackstone and Apollo Global Management have struck deals with Anthropic, while Bain, TPG and Brookfield have formed a venture with OpenAI.

Eldridge has instead acquired a 50 per cent stake in European AI company Sudolabs, giving the firm and its portfolio companies access to a team of about 70 specialists, including roughly 40 engineers, to work on AI projects.

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Eldridge has backed a number of companies seeking to ride the AI wave, including cloud computing group CoreWeave. But Sudolabs is designed to shore up their firm’s own AI capabilities.

Boehly and Minella said the deal will allow it to use AI to streamline due diligence and other parts of Eldridge’s investment process, as it looks to accelerate analysis and reduce manual work across the firm.

Eldridge has worked with Anthropic on similar projects, but opted to invest in Sudolabs in part to avoid becoming overly reliant on a single US AI provider.

“Single-sourced is never a good place to be, no matter what you’re talking about,” said Boehly. “I think our supply chains are seeing that, our energy infrastructure is seeing that, the Strait of Hormuz is teaching us that.”

“We’re credit people, and we know what being captive means when you’re a credit person,” he added.