The unit, which counts Yahoo and Alibaba among its successes, will be wound down in favour of larger investments, the first of which could be in lending platform SoFi.
Japan-based telecommunications and internet company SoftBank plans to wind down its early-stage corporate venturing vehicle, SoftBank Capital, to focus on fewer, larger investments, Re/Code reported yesterday.
The decision was made by incoming president Nikesh Arora, who has also been cited as a possible successor to SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son.
SoftBank formed SoftBank Capital in 1995 and the unit has played a considerable part in helping it expand from a pure-play telecommunications firms to one of the largest global players in the internet space, making early stage investments in internet company Yahoo, e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba and media company The Huffington Post among others.
However, Arora is opting to concentrate more on the types of large growth-stage investments its corporate parent has recently made in businesses such as ride sharing services Didi Kuaidi and Ola, and e-commerce companies Coupang and Snapdeal.
SoftBank Capital will not raise additional capital in future, and will only make follow-on investments from the $100m fund it raised in September 2014 and the $250m growth-stage SoftBank PrinceVille Fund it formed in 2013.
The company’s New York-based fund, managed by Jordy Levy and Josh Guttman and partially funded by external partners, will continue to make new investments but will likely do so under a new name.
SoftBank Capital will transfer the management of its 2010 and 2014 early-stage funds to venture capital fund Lerer Hippeau Ventures. SoftBank will generally provide venture capital funding from its own balance sheet. Smaller, early-stage investments will become the exception rather than the norm.
Arora told Re/code: “As we look at the future for the next tens of years, we believe that the way to preserve the long-term sustainability of SoftBank is to be large minority shareholders of many assets.
“We believe that it is less crowded in the large-cheque marketplace and it is a smaller universe of companies we have to understand and support.”
One of SoftBank’s upcoming larger investments is likely to be in US-based alternative lending platform Social Finance, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cited a filing on the website of the Federal Trade Commission.
All investments greater than $76.3m must be listed on the website by law and are subject to an antitrust review by the FTC. A spokeswoman from SoftBank confirmed the prospective funding to the WSJ.
SoFi has so far raised $780m in debt and equity from investors including social network Renren. It is reportedly planning a $500m initial public offering later this year that would value it at $3.5bn.