Top 50 Rising Stars 2022 (in alphabetical order by CVC unit): Priya Saiprasad, partner, SoftBank Investment Advisers

Priya Saiprasad is a partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers (SBIA), the investment arm of Japan-headquartered telecommunications and internet group SoftBank that manages its Vision Funds, where she focuses on growth-stage software and consumer technology developers.

She joined SBIA in June 2021, having previously spent about two years as a venture partner at venture capital firm Mayfield Fund, where she helped back companies developing artificial intelligence and data analytics-equipped software products.

Prior to joining Mayfield Fund, Saiprasad held a three-year stint at software provider Microsoft’s corporate venture capital (CVC) subsidiary, M12, from 2016 as a founding principal.

AI technology developers Element AI and Bonsai were among her investments at M12, as were business planning software developer Workboard, corporate education provider Go1 and workforce management platform Skedulo and document management technology provider PandaDoc.

At SBIA, Saiprasad works alongside her previous manager Nagraj Kashyap, who has been a managing partner at SBIA since February 2021 having founded and headed M12 for five years from 2016.

Before M12, Saiprasad was corporate development deal lead at digital payment processor Square for two years, after a two-and-a-half-year senior associate role at investment firm Saints Capital and an analyst position at investment bank UBS, which she held for nearly two years.

Saiprasad holds a bachelor of science in business administration from University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Edison Fu

Edison Fu is a reporter and Asia liaison at Global Corporate Venturing.