Tag: Masayoshi Son
SoftBank-backed construction giant Katerra said to be shutting down after raising billions
After burning through more than $2 billion in funding, SoftBank-backed construction startup Katerra has told employees that it will be shutting down operations, according to a report in The Information. Last year, the company claimed it had more than 8,000 employees globally. Menlo Park-based Katerra had already been struggling to…
Read More
Arm’s financials and the blurring future of the semiconductor sector
Amidst the blitz of SoftBank earnings news today comes the financials for all of SoftBank’s subsidiaries, which includes Arm Holdings, the most important chip design and research company in the world that SoftBank bought for $32 billion back in 2016. Arm produces almost all of the key designs for the…
Read More
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 a fledgling Hong Kong-based startup called Alibaba. That $20 million investment into the Chinese ecommerce business would go on to…
Read More
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 the Vision Fund, with huge losses at WeWork and Uber due to corporate incompetence, intrigue, and of course, COVID-19. But…
Read More
With fresh support from its billionaire backers Pivot Bio is ushering in a farming revolution
In the first decade of the twentieth century two German chemists, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, invented fertilizer — the nitrogen compound which ushered in modern agriculture and saved the world from potential starvation. Now, over a century later, a new group of scientists backed by government-owned international investment funds…
Read More
Pandemic reset leads investors to focus on resilience, adaptability
Mahendra Ramsinghani Contributor More posts by this contributor How to make a deal with a VC at a tech conference With Alibaba, Pivotal and Lightbend on board, Reactive flexes its ROI muscle in the microservices world For the vast majority of startup founders who were planning their capital raise in…
Read More