The SoftBank Vision Fund announced its first major close with over U.S.$93 billion of committed capital.
In addition to SoftBank Group and the Public Investment Fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (PIF) as previously announced, investors in the Fund also include the Mubadala Investment Company of the United Arab Emirates, Apple, Foxconn Technology, Qualcomm and Sharp. The Fund is targeting a total of U.S.$100 billion of committed capital, with a final close within six months.
SBG created the SoftBank Vision Fund as a result of its strongly held belief that the next stage of the Information Revolution is underway, and building the businesses that will make this possible will require unprecedented large scale long-term investment. Additionally, the Fund’s portfolio companies are expected to significantly benefit from SBG's global scale and operational expertise, as well as its ecosystem of group portfolio companies (including Sprint and Yahoo Japan); this will thereby help them to accelerate their own growth profile.
The Fund will be SBG’s primary vehicle to realise its SoftBank 2.0 vision, with preferred access to investments of U.S. $100 million or more that meet the Fund's investment strategy.
The Fund is expected to be active across a wide range of technology sectors, including but not limited to: IoT, artificial intelligence, robotics, mobile applications and computing, communications infrastructure and telecoms, computational biology and other data-driven business models, cloud technologies and software, consumer internet businesses and financial technology.
The Fund will have the right to acquire certain investments already acquired or agreed to be acquired by the SoftBank Group, including 24.99% of its holding in ARM, and investments in Guardant Health, Intelsat, NVIDIA, OneWeb and SoFi.
Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO, Softbank Group
Technology has the potential to address the biggest challenges and risks facing humanity today. The businesses working to solve these problems will require patient long-term capital and visionary strategic investment partners with the resources to nurture their success.
