We recently compiled a list of the Jeff Bezos Investments in 2025: 12 Companies Bezos Is Investing In. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ:WDAY) stands against the other companies Bezos is investing in.
Since leaving his position as CEO of Amazon in 2021, Jeff Bezos has been quite active. He has been investing in real estate and companies, staying involved with Amazon and Blue Origin, and becoming close to President-elect Trump. “I’ve actually never worked harder,” he told the New York Times last December.
Jeff Bezos has directly invested in at least 108 startups across all industries since 1998, when he was reported to have invested $250,000 into Google. Although he does not publish his returns nor do the firms in which he invests, he has made early bets on several companies that have gone on to launch some of the most high-profile tech IPOs in the recent decade.
He certainly has enough cash to play with. According to Forbes, Bezos has sold around $32 billion in his main company shares since its initial public offering, including nearly $14 billion last year. He is now the third richest person in the world, with a net worth of $237 billion.
Although Bezos has spent a lot of time and money on yachts, aircraft, and real estate since transitioning from CEO to chairman of Amazon in 2021, he remains actively involved in his venture portfolio, advising portfolio firms and assisting with investment selections. However, Bezos isn’t as engaged as, say, a typical large venture capital firm: he was only the lead investor in one funding round last year (for Swiss-Mile), which means he likely didn’t acquire significant stakes in the majority of the companies, and he isn’t known to hold a board seat at any of the startups he has backed.
Two of the companies Forbes contacted said that a Bezos spokesman asked them not to discuss with the media about the Bezos investment, but those who did speak favorably about it. Swiss-Mile’s Bjelonic, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, made the following comment:
“What I was most surprised with was actually how well he understood the technology behind the Al training. He would ask questions about reinforcement learning, imitation learning, how it works, going all the way to the details of the physics elements that are needed on our side.”
Regardless of how invested Bezos is in any given company, publicizing his name as an investor provides marketing exposure.
The autonomous robot business is still in its early stages of commercialization. Bjelonic compared the business to a “blue ocean,” predicting that in ten years, hundreds of robotics startups will fail while only a few will flourish. It will take years to determine whether those bets pay off.
However, the chances may be in Bezos’ favor, in part because he can combine his economic expertise with the fact that he will almost certainly be able to invest in any firm he chooses.
According to Columbia Business School professor Michael Ewens, the “best” and “hottest” startups reach out to people like Bezos first.
“In general, he’s a very good investor, because he’s getting calls. He’s first in line.”
A group of finance professionals analyzing market trends on their computer screens.
Methodology
We examined the investments of Bezos Expeditions, Jeff Bezos’ family office, to identify key companies he’s invested in. All selected firms are publicly traded except the last one, and the stocks are ranked in ascending order using Insider Monkey’s database of over 1,000 hedge funds in Q4 2024 to gauge hedge fund sentiment for stocks. The portfolio also includes one of his most recent private company investments, which is ranked last on our list.
Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 373.4% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 218 percentage points (see more details here).
Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ:WDAY)
Number of Hedge Fund Investors: 89
Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ:WDAY) is included in Jeff Bezos Stock Portfolio. It is among the technology firms that Bezos Expeditions has invested in during its expansion and initial public offering, partly due to the enterprise cloud software company’s close ties to Amazon Web Services. Despite going public back in 2012, the company is still growing at rates with a projected revenue expansion of almost 15% in fiscal year 2025 and 13% in 2026. Workday is a prominent player in the larger digital ecosystem and is still one of the top stocks that Bezos is purchasing for 2025. It is one of the top producers of cloud-based applications for human resources management and finance.
The company’s recent quarterly performance has been strong, with sales increasing 15.8% over the same period last year. The operating margin grew from 4.7% to 7.6%, and the diluted net income per share was $0.72, which was 67% more than the year before. It is unsurprising that it was rated a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprise. Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ:WDAY) maintains a strong innovation culture while gaining new customers. Many of its clients have purchased subscriptions to the complete range of Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management products. The HR and finance processes will be streamlined with a newer version of Workday Assistant.
Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ:WDAY) announced Gerrit Kazmaier’s appointment as President, Product and Technology, on February 20, 2025, with effect from March 10, 2025. Kazmaier, who has vast experience with SAP and Google Cloud, will be in charge of Workday’s product and technology department as well as its innovation strategy. It is anticipated that Kazmaier’s appointment will accelerate Workday’s cloud transformation and AI ambitions, solidifying the company’s standing as a pioneer in business software innovation.
Overall WDAY ranks 3rd on our list of Jeff Bezos’ Investments in 2025. While we acknowledge the potential for WDAY as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than WDAY but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.
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Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
