Vision Fund
China Roundup: SoftBank leads Didi’s $500M round and Meituan crosses $100B valuation
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world.…
SoftBank led $500M investment in Didi in China’s biggest autonomous driving round
The race to automate vehicles on China’s roads is heating up. Didi, the Uber of China, announced on Friday an outsized investment of over $500 million in its freshly minted…
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…
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re digging into SoftBank’s latest earnings slides. Not only…
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…
Jack Ma to resign from SoftBank Group’s board of directors
SoftBank Group said today that Jack Ma, co-founder of Alibaba Group, will step down from its board after serving as a director for 13 years. Ma’s resignation will be effective…
Earlier today a grip of new data presented a sharply negative picture of the American economy. And this afternoon, news broke that a trio of well-known, heavily-backed unicorns were cutting…
VC activity goes upside down as seed deals fall and mega-rounds rise
We’re talking about three trends this morning: The sharp decline in Q1 U.S. seed rounds, how mega-rounds ($100 million and larger funding events) are holding up the sky for domestic…
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…
The second wave of unicorn layoffs is brutal
This morning, let’s remind go over what happened in the first wave of recent unicorn layoffs (Zume, Oyo, Uber, etc) and how it compares to what is happening today as…
Veteran VC Mike Volpi discusses investing and fundraising in ‘a very difficult time’
Last week, I talked with Mike Volpi, longtime Index Ventures partner and the former head of M&A at Cisco for many years before that. We originally planned to talk about…
Yesterday, TechCrunch broke the news that Sequoia, one of the best-known venture capital firms in the market today, had “parted ways with [Finix] over a purported conflict of interest and,…
Latin America Roundup: SoftBank adds $1B, Stori raises $10M and Grow Mobility puts on the brakes
After investing nearly $2 billion of its Innovation Fund in Latin America in 2019, SoftBank announced this month that it would add an additional $1 billion into the fund.
Karius raises $165 million for its liquid biopsy technology identifying diseases with a blood draw
“What Karius is good at is identifying those novel microbes before they become an outbreak like coronavirus,” says Mickey Kertesz, a chief executive whose life sciences startup just hauled in…
As a top manager leaves amid fundraising woes, SoftBank’s vision looks dimmer — and schadenfreude abounds
Every once in a while, an organization implodes so fantastically that it’s hard in retrospect to understand why another outcome once seemed possible. With every passing day, SoftBank — which…
Are January layoffs just a few post-WeWork jitters? TechCrunch has found itself writing about layoffs at a few notable tech companies this week — and not just SoftBank-backed ones. The…
Uber’s self-driving unit starts mapping Washington, D.C. ahead of testing
Uber Advanced Technologies Group will start mapping Washington, D.C., ahead of plans to begin testing its self-driving vehicles in the city this year. Initially, there will be three Uber vehicles…
Layoffs reach 23andMe after hitting Mozilla and the Vision Fund portfolio
Layoffs in the technology and venture-backed worlds continued today, as 23andMe confirmed to CNBC that it laid off around 100 people, or about 14% of its formerly 700-person staff. The…
Rappi and Oyo pare staff as Vision Fund companies trim costs, target profits
This week we’ve covered layoffs at unicorns both inside the Vision Fund and out. This afternoon we add two more to our list: Oyo and Rappi. The staff reductions are…
As Zume layoffs loom, a look back at SoftBank’s troubled investing year
Changing from the highest-flying conglomerate and most famous capital vehicle to troubled icons of misplaced exuberance, it’s tough to be SoftBank and its Vision Fund today. Despite the occasional good…
The five biggest rounds in tech in 2019 and what they mean
Funding for tech startups has been on an inevitable upswing for years, a result of a virtuous circle where wildly successful tech companies on the public markets whet the appetites…
VCs from Accel and SoftBank talk Europe’s startup scene, what they expect in 2020, and the future of SoftBank
If you haven’t noticed, Europe’s startup scene is in full bloom, with more than $30 billion deployed in startups across the continent over the last 12 months and more than…
OneConnect’s drastic IPO value cut underscores the risk of high-growth, high-burn companies
OneConnect’s U.S.-listed IPO flew under our radar last week, which won’t do. The company’s public offering is both interesting and important, so let’s take a few minutes this morning to…
SoftBank Vision Fund’s Carolina Brochado is coming to Disrupt Berlin
SoftBank’s Vision Fund has single-handedly changed the game when it comes to tech startup investment. And that’s why I’m excited to announce that SoftBank Vision Fund investment director Carolina Brochado…
Limited partners or LPs — the pension funds, the university endowments, the family offices that largely provide venture firms with their spending money — are receiving a lot of attention…
Report: SoftBank is taking control of WeWork at an ~$8B valuation
SoftBank expected to inject as much as $5B in the struggling business.
SoftBank reportedly preps a package to take control of WeWork parent company
SoftBank Group, the multibillion-dollar Japanese technology conglomerate and investment firm, has put together a bid that would save WeWork parent company The We Company, just weeks before the co-working real…
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…
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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…
