SoftBank Group
SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son announced on Thursday that the Japanese tech giant has set up a joint venture in the country with Chicago-based health tech company Tempus. Together, the…
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.…
SoftBank Group backs former Argo AI founders on new self-driving trucks startup Stack AV
There’s a new self-driving trucks startup in town. And the faces are familiar. Bryan Salesky, Peter Rander and Brett Browning — the trio behind the now defunct Ford and VW-backed…
SoftBank and Symbotic team to offer automated warehouses as a service
When it comes to retail, it’s Amazon versus the world. That’s been true for a long time and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Plenty of factors…
SoftBank Vision Fund yearly loss widens to $32B on startups valuation cut
SoftBank Vision Fund lost $32 billion in the financial year ending March as the Japanese investment giant, the most prolific global investor in tech startups, continues to suffer from valuation…
General Atlantic buys out SoftBank’s 15% stake in edtech Kahoot, now valued at about $152M vs the $215M SoftBank ponied up 2 years ago
SoftBank’s retreat from its past investing exuberance continues apace. This morning, Kahoot, the Norwegian startup that provides a popular platform for people to build and use education-focused games, announced that…
Key issues you should consider before signing an international merger deal
By understanding the key issues in cross-border tech M&A, an international acquirer can close a successful transaction and achieve its commercial objectives in the United States.
Klarna founder to launch new ‘Nobel Prize for Impact’
According to BCG global assets under management are around $100 trillion, but only $715 billion, or less than 1%, goes on what you might term “impact” companies or projects to…
SoftBank, Sequoia China back this ERP startup enabling China’s online exporters
Thanks to cross-border e-commerce platforms, China continues to be a major exporter of consumer goods for the world in the online shopping age. It’s not just marketplaces like Amazon and…
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…
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.
China’s Jaka Robotics fueled by Saudi Arabia’s Prosperity7 in global push
Jaka Robotics, a Chinese startup that makes collaborative robots, has just pulled in a hefty Series D funding round of over $150 million from a lineup of heavyweight investors to…
Go1 nabs $100M at a $2B+ valuation to upgrade its curated enterprise learning platform
Online education continues to get a lot of attention in the wake of COVID-19 and the shift it brought to how people can learn. And to underscore that fact, Go1…
Social app IRL lays off 25% of team, says it has enough cash to last well into 2024
“We have all seen the state of the market,” IRL CEO and co-founder Abraham Shafi wrote in a company-wide memo where the social app announced it would be dramatically cutting…
New York-based Digital Asset to help Japan’s financial giant SBI develop ‘smart yen’
SBI Holdings, a Japanese securities and banking giant that launched a crypto-asset fund for retail investors last year, has been actively investing in the infrastructure that will allow it to…
Firework provides tools for retailers and consumer brands to tap into their own customer data to build engaging video experiences across their own digital properties and social channels.
SoftBank Latin America is certainly having massive exits, but not the lucrative kind. Paulo Passoni and Shu Nyatta, two managing investment partners of SoftBank’s Latin America practice, are leaving the…
Observe.ai raises $125M, adding Zoom as an investor, to supercharge the contact center market
Contact centers play a key part in how a company engages with customers, amounting to what is a $400 billion market globally. Today, a company that believes it can improve…
A look at six new funds begs the question: Is a slowdown really coming?
If that slowdown comes, however, it could happen slowly, given that our inboxes are filled with news about newly raised venture funds.
Remote raises $300M more, now at a $3B+ valuation, to manage payments and more for globally distributed workforces
Remote workforces have come into their own in the last several years, with companies ever more willing to tap into talent wherever it happens to be, and a vast array…
CommerceIQ gets its horn as capital continues to flow into e-commerce infrastructure startups
CEO Guru Hariharan sees the $4.5 trillion retail industry at a massive inflection point.
Weee! delivers second big funding round in a year, this time backed by SoftBank
This new monster round comes about a year after another big fundraise of $316 million in Series D financing.
This latest round gives the company $300 million in total funding raised in the past two years and a $1.5 billion valuation.
H Twenty Capital aims to be ‘go-to fund for pre-seed investments’ in Latin America
Venture capital continues to flow into Latin America at a staggering rate. Just over $15 billion went into startups in 2021, according to LAVCA. That was three times more than…
Clikalia clicks on $86M to expand its iBuyer marketplace across Europe and Latin America
Companies like Opendoor opened the door to a new way of buying and selling properties by inserting a strong middle player who could buy houses or apartments and redevelop them…
Nvidia’s deal to acquire Arm is off, the two companies and Arm owner SoftBank announced Tuesday. With this, there is also a major leadership change at Arm. The company’s current…
Low-code integration platform Digibee raises $25M Series A
Digibee, a low-code integration platform, is doing what all low-code integration platforms are apparently doing right now: raising funding. The company today announced that it has raised a $25 million…
Esusu becomes unicorn with SoftBank Vision Fund 2-led $130M funding
More than 100 million Americans spend an average of $1,100 (over $1.4 trillion per year) on their largest monthly household spend: rent. But reports say 90% of these people don’t get…
Paack pulls in a $225M Series D led by SoftBank to scale its e-commerce delivery platform
By now, many of us are familiar with the warehouse robots that populate those vast spaces occupied by the likes of Amazon and others. In particular, Amazon was very much…
ByteDance reorganizes strategic investment team, causes panic
What a roller coaster day for China’s tech industry. TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has dissolved its strategic investment team, sending worrying messages to other internet giants that have expanded aggressively…
