Washington - Despite the financial constraints the corporate world is facing due to Covid-19, founder of the e-commerce giant Amazon Jeff Bezos is set to invest a portion of his wealth in a British technology start-up which aims at becoming the world’s renowned logistics company.
According to Sky News, the world richest person has agreed to back Beacon, a specialist in digital freight forwarding and supply chain finance.
Bezos, who the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates is now worth $143bn (£116bn) is understood to be participating in a $15m (£12.2m) Series A fundraising. It is set to be announced by Beacon this week.
Luring the world's wealthiest man as a backer represents a huge coup for Beacon, particularly because as the founder and chief executive of Amazon, Bezos is intimately acquainted with the complexities of supply chain management.
The tycoon, who owns the Washington Post, has a long track record of investing in start-ups, with Airbnb and Grail, a cancer detection company, among those he has backed.
He holds a roughly 12% stake in Amazon, which has vied with Apple, Google's parent Alphabet, and Microsoft for the status of the world's most valuable publicly-traded company.
At Friday's closing share price of $2442.37, Amazon was worth $1.22trn (£988bn). This is according to the reports revealed by Sky news.
The world's richest man is said to be making $2,489 (R36,301) per second, which is more than twice what the median US worker makes in one week, according to calculations by Business Insider.
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