SoftBank Group, could announce the raising of a ballooning $95 billion for its technology fund, sometime next week. The report was first published on Bloomberg which quoted people familiar with the matter.
Masayoshi Son, the Chief Executive Officer of SoftBank Group, had also remarked last week when the company reported earnings that,
It’s pretty close. The details have been pretty much decided on. It’s just a matter of time.
The SoftBank Vision Fund has garnered a lot of attention from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. The latter had revealed the plans of fueling as much as $45 million over a period of next five years in the fund. Additionally, Apple Inc. had confirmed the commitment of one billion, while Qualcomm Inc. and Oracle Founder Larry Ellison also announced the plans to participate in the largest fund of its kind.
SoftBank plans to kickstart the fund by investing $25 billion of its own in the coming five years. The sources had told that Abu Dhabhi’s Mubadala Development Co. is also mulling to pump about $15 billion.
The Vision Fund, which will be based in London, will be utilized to make strategic investments in tech based ventures. Earlier, talking about the fund, Masayoshi had commented,
Over the next decade, the SoftBank Vision Fund will be the biggest investor in the technology sector.
This pretty much seems to true, $100 Billion is a really huge amount. National Venture Capital Association had predicted that the corpus would be almost be equal to all the funds raised by US venture capital firms over the past two and a half years. Bloomberg mentions SoftBank had already committed to over $30 million on technology companies in the past one year.
SoftBank, via the technology fund, is expected to pump money into Asia, where it already has invested large amounts in China’s Didi, Singaporean cab aggregator Grab, and India-based Snapdeal as well as Ola.
