Masayoshi Son

It’s The Jons 2019!

Happy New Year! It’s been another wild and wacky ride of a year in the tech world: breakthroughs and disgraces, triumphs and catastrophes, cryptocurrencies and starships, the ongoing rise of uto

The herd sours on unprofitable unicorns again

Profitability is tied to growth. You can have one or the other, but rarely both simultaneously.

WeWork confirms an up to $8 billion lifeline from SoftBank Group; names new executive chairman

Confirming earlier reports, The We Company and SoftBank Group agreed to a new capital infusion which will see SoftBank committing $5 billion in new financing and issuing a tender offer for another $3

VC Brad Feld on WeWork, SoftBank, and why venture firms may have to slow down their pacing in 2020

Yesterday, we had a chance to talk with longtime venture investor Brad Feld of Foundry Group, whose book “Venture Deals” was recently republished for the fourth time, and for good reason.

ClimateTech is the new hot space for investors in a warming planet

How do you attract the attention of a prince? Aside from being Meghan Markle, of course. One answer came recently in the form of Prince Harry’s backing of a new initiative designed to make offsettin

As Adam Neumann reportedly faces pressure to step down; it’s looking like a fight for life between WeWork and SoftBank

According to a new WSJ report, certain members of WeWork’s board, which includes co-founder and CEO Adam Neumann, are planning to pressure Neumann to step down and instead become We’s non-

SoftBank reportedly plans to lend employees as much as $20 billion to invest in its VC fund

SoftBank has a plan to loan up to $20 billion to its employees, including CEO Masayoshi Son, for the purposes of having that capital re-invested in SoftBank’s own Vision venture fund, according

SoftBank pumps $2B into Indonesia through Grab investment, putting it head to head with Gojek

Grab — the on-demand transportation app worth $14 billion that is the Uber of Southeast Asia — today announced how it would be using some of the $7 billion or so that it has raised to date

Microsoft and the second SoftBank Vision Fund as another play for corporate cloud dominance

It looks like the return of SoftBank’s Vision Fund may be less reliant on murder money and more reliant on Microsoft’s money-making machine for its backing. The rumored involvement of Micr

Microsoft in talks to invest in SoftBank’s second Vision Fund

A second Vision Fund is in the works.

Arm shows SoftBank does tech PE the right way

Private equity firms get a bad rap — and not without reason. In the prototypical example, a bunch of men in suits (and these folks always seem to be men for some reason) swoop in from Manhattan with

What happens if there’s no Vision Fund II?

Recent headlines describe a world that might never see a Vision Fund II. Would it matter?

The Stanford ties to Latin America’s startup renaissance

The houses along the tree-lined blocks of Josina Avenue in Palo Alto, with their big back yards, swimming pools and driveways are about as far removed from the snarls of traffic, sputtering diesel eng

Key Vision Fund investors are reportedly lukewarm on a second fund

SoftBank shook up the venture capital world with its unprecedented $100 billion Vision Fund, and the speculation continues around its follow-up. The fund hasn’t quite closed $100 billion —

EV Growth closes $200M fund to cover Southeast Asia’s Series B funding gap

East Ventures has long been known as one of Indonesia’s longest-serving and most active seed-stage investors, but now it has officially moved up the food chain after it announced a final close o

Masayoshi Son claims Vision Fund LPs are already up 45% — but that’s mostly paper gains

Uber, WeWork and Slack’s IPOs are poised to pay out for SoftBank’s Vision Fund, but already the megafund is claiming impressive results. At SoftBank Corp.’s annual shareholder meetin

SoftBank Vision Fund says its team will balloon to a whopping 800 people in the next 24 months

SoftBank Vision Fund has its pedal to the metal in more ways than one. On stage at the Milken Institute Global Conference yesterday, the CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisors, Rajeev Misra, reportedly d

Grab plans to raise $2B more this year to fund an acquisition spree in Southeast Asia

Always be raisin’. That appears to be the motto of Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing companies Grab and Go-Jek. Fresh from closing a near-$1.5 billion raise from SoftBank’s Vision Fund a

Huawei sues America as SoftBank spends more money

Today, a bunch of analysis on stories we have been covering the last few weeks. You’re reading the Extra Crunch Daily. Like this newsletter? Subscribe for free to follow all of our discussions

500 Startups Japan becomes Coral Capital with a new $45M fund

The 500 Startups Japan crew is going independent. The VC firm announced a $30 million fund in 2015, and now the follow-up is a new $45 million fund called Coral Capital. Helmed by James Riney and Yohe
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