Alex Clavel, CEO at SoftBank Investment Advisers, is one of the 100 leading corporate venturing professionals in our 2025 Powerlist.

“It is a very exciting time to be an investor in technology, given everything that is going on with AI,” says Alex Clavel, CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisers, a segment of SoftBank Group that manages the SoftBank Vision Funds.

“We are making big and small investments in companies with the common theme of AI and the information and societal revolution that we see coming because of it,” he says.

Clavel joined investment holding company SoftBank Group in 2015 in Tokyo, following nearly 20 years in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, where he focused on technology, media and telecoms M&A. Prior to taking on his present role, Clavel had already moved up from a managing partner position to become chief executive of SoftBank Group International, which oversees many of the group’s operating companies, in 2022.

“We are making big and small investments in companies with the common theme of AI and the information and societal revolution that we see coming because of it.”

SoftBank Investment Advisers manages the world’s largest set of technology funds, with $170bn in assets under management and a portfolio of nearly 500 companies worldwide.

Earlier this year, SoftBank led a $40bn fundraising round for generative AI developer OpenAI – the largest funding round for a startup to date.

“Our most exciting new investment would be OpenAI,” says Clavel. “We have also invested in a joint venture in Japan, where we and OpenAI will be partners for driving its business in corporate Japan.”

“We also exited our final shares of Doordash, which was our best performing asset to date – 150% IRR, $7bn gross gain and almost 12 times money-on-money return,” says Clavel. “We are very excited about the space we are in.”

Speaking about the areas in which his team is looking to invest in the next 12 months, Clavel says that while the focus remains on AI, there is a lot to discover within the sector. “It could be large language models such as OpenAI, industries that can be disrupted by AI, and software companies that use AI in different ways to build a moat against their competitors. While AI can be an all-encompassing term, there are lots of different flavours for what we do within that,” he says.


The Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist represents the 100 individuals spearheading the future of the corporate venturing industry.

These individuals excel in terms of their venturing approach and structure, number and quality of portfolio companies and in their contributions to the corporate venturing profession.

See the full 2025 Powerlist here.