Alex Clavel, CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisers, is one of the 100 leading corporate venturing professionals in our 2026 Powerlist.
“It is a very exciting time to be an investor as artificial superintelligence is quickly becoming one of the most consequential technological shifts in history,” shared Alex Clavel, CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisers (SBIA), a segment of SoftBank Group that manages the SoftBank Vision Funds, in an earlier interview for GCV.
And for a company founded and run by ‘Gambling Man’ Masayoshi Son, SoftBank has laid down its biggest bet so far on generative AI developer OpenAI.
Last year, SoftBank led a $40bn fundraising round for OpenAI – then the biggest-ever round – only to trump it this year. At the end of March, OpenAI raised another record-breaking $122bn, valuing the AI company at approximately $852bn. SoftBank’s conditional commitment of another $30bn was matched by Nvidia’s $30bn and beaten by Amazon’s conditional investment of $50bn. The funding is intended to fuel a pivot towards a “unified AI superapp” that combines chat, coding (Codex) and agentic capabilities.
Clavel, who joined investment holding company SoftBank Group in 2015 in Tokyo, has ridden the rollercoaster several times with Son. And he is used to allocating resources to the next new, new thing, with more than a dozen deals so far this year, including Wayve in the UK, Sierra in the U.S. and Emergent in India.
In late 2025, SoftBank sold its entire remaining stake in Nvidia for approximately $5.83bn to redeploy capital toward AI ventures and has borrowed against the uplift of valuations at chip designer Arm, which floated in 2023, but where SoftBank retains about a near-90% stake.
But this attention misses the real power of what SoftBank has achieved as a corporate venturer active across markets and regions. Excluding Nvidia, SoftBank has exited its stakes in about 30 companies, including Wiz, which Alphabet acquired for $32bn, and PayPay and Klarna.
Clavel joined SoftBank 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.
SoftBank Investment Advisers manages perhaps the world’s largest set of technology funds, with $170bn in assets under management and a portfolio of nearly 500 companies worldwide. Clavel’s Vision Fund unit has seen massive volatility, including a $6.2bn loss in Q2 2023, followed by a strong recovery with a $46bn gain in FY2025 driven by companies like OpenAI and continued strength across its private portfolio.
The GCV 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.
Here’s a snapshot of their recent deals:
