Masayoshi Son

SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son is reportedly seeking $100B to build a new AI chip venture 

SoftBank Group’s Masayoshi Son has made no secret of his intent to double down on the red-hot artificial intelligence industry. Now he’s fundraising for his next move in that strategy. Acc

SoftBank’s vibe shift is using silence loudly

Welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. It’s February, and that means two things: you can stop wishing p

SoftBank to trim Alibaba stake to 14.6%, poised to book $34B gain

Masayoshi Son famously built his war chest by pumping $20 million into Alibaba two decades ago. Over the years the Chinese e-commerce behemoth has become a way for the billionaire founder of SoftBank

Losses at SoftBank’s Vision Funds have consumed nearly all their historical gains

The Vision Fund was always a funded vision; today we learned just how cloudy that perspective is proving.

SoftBank Group International’s new CEO is leaving, just five months after being appointed

If SoftBank investors were already feeling shaken by the conglomerate’s poor performance this year, a news release out of the company tonight isn’t exactly going to assuage their concerns.

SoftBank may cut startup investments by more than half this year

SoftBank may cut its startup investments this fiscal year (FY 2023) by more than half, chief executive Masayoshi Son said on an earnings call Thursday, the latest high-profile investor to become vocal

At SoftBank, a reported battle over pay with COO Marcelo Claure adds to other bad news

Not for the first time, SoftBank is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. Indeed, even while the Japanese conglomerate is known for its extremes — be it bold bets, internal squabb

TechCrunch+ roundup: Deep tech predictions, HashiCorp’s IPO, enterprisewide AI

If you believe you have a good idea for a startup, go for it. When venture capitalists say this is a good time to be a founder, you know they absolutely mean it.

VCs unfazed by Chinese regulatory shakeups (so far)

Slightly falling quarterly venture capital totals and a notable decline in unicorn formation does not a startup winter make. So let’s look at what's happened more recently.

SoftBank-backed construction giant Katerra said to be shutting down after raising billions

After burning through more than $2 billion in funding, SoftBank-backed construction startup Katerra has told employees that it will be shutting down operations, according to a report in The Informatio

Masayoshi Son says SoftBank now has ‘$80 billion in cash on hand’ just in case

Masayoshi Son, the founder and CEO of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, has had a topsy-turvy year or two, but the story he is eager to tell is that he is back and in the black. Such was the overarc

How SoftBank’s Vision Fund turned losses into gold this summer

It’s hard to think back to the Vision Fund era today, given the oddities that 2020 has brought. But SoftBank’s gravity-bending investment vehicle only stopped investing last September, end

Motif FoodWorks preps commercial production for its first ingredient

Motif FoodWorks, the Ginkgo Bioworks spinout focused on developing new plant-based flavorings and food ingredients, is readying commercial scale production of its first product — an ingredient t

Masayoshi Son resigns from board of Alibaba; defends SoftBank Group’s investment strategy

SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son said on Thursday he is leaving the board of Jack Ma’s Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group today, a month after Ma left the board of Son’s technology group.

Arm’s financials and the blurring future of the semiconductor sector

Amidst the blitz of SoftBank earnings news today comes the financials for all of SoftBank’s subsidiaries, which includes Arm Holdings, the most important chip design and research company in the worl

As Jack Ma and SoftBank part ways, the open and globalized era of tech comes ever closer to an end

It would be one of the greatest startup investments of all time. Masayoshi Son, riding high in the klieg lights of the 1990s dot-com bubble, invested $20 million dollars into a fledgling Hong Kong-bas

The first Vision Fund is officially done investing (and spent $100M every day of its existence)

There is a flurry of news out of SoftBank this morning, which announced its Fiscal Year 2019 (ending March 31, 2020) financial results overnight. It’s been a bad year for the Vision Fund, with huge

With fresh support from its billionaire backers Pivot Bio is ushering in a farming revolution

In the first decade of the twentieth century two German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, invented fertilizer — the nitrogen compound which ushered in modern agriculture and saved the world

Pandemic reset leads investors to focus on resilience, adaptability

Mahendra Ramsinghani Contributor Share on X Mahendra Ramsinghani is the founder of Secure Octane Investments, investing in cloud infrastructure and security startups. When he is not investing, he is b

SoftBank expects $24 billion in losses from Vision Fund, WeWork and OneWeb investments

The Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank Group said it would lose a staggering $24 billion on investments made through its Vision Fund and bets on the co-working real estate company WeWork and sa
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