The corporate venturing veteran, who founded Microsoft’s CVC, M12, joins the list of recent departures from the embattled fund.
Nagraj Kashyap, former managing partner at SoftBank Vision Fund, has left the investment company after two-and-half-years.
Kashyap said in a LinkedIn post that he is moving on from later stage growth investing but staying on in venture to work with founders in the early stage of their development.
The news comes just days after SoftBank group revealed that the Vision Fund posted an investment loss of $5.5bn in the last quarter of 2022. The fund has seen a wave of job cuts after starting to post steep losses last year, as the value of technology stocks tumbled.
This is the latest in a series of departures from the fund. Saurabh Jalan left his position as partner at the fund in November. Other recent exits include managing partner Catherine Lenson and director Vishal Gupta while chief executive Rajeev Misra has reportedly stepped back to focus on his own fund.
Softbank reorganised its corporate venture operations under a new executive committee in October last year after it announced job cuts representing 30% of its investment team.
SoftBank was once one of the most active investors in technology startups, investing more than $140bn in more than 450 companies in the five years since the launch of the first Vision Fund. Now SoftBank has pulled back substantially from investing. It revealed it had invested just $300m in startups in the December quarter, down 90% from the previous year.
Kashyap joined Softbank Investment Advisors, the corporate venturing arm of the Japanese telecommunications and internet group, in early 2021 to lead software and consumer investments. While at the fund, he built out the software-as-a service application practice in the US.
Kashyap founded M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, in 2016 to invest in software startups. He was also a founding partner of Qualcomm Ventures, which he joined in 2003. He went on to become global head of the fund.
