SoftBank Vision Fund, based out of Japan, is planning to expand its ecosystem connections in India by hiring dozen executives for its India operations over the next few months, cited Inc42. The Fund will use the new team for expansion of its network pan India.
Munish Varma, managing partners of SoftBank Investment Advisers, said, “while the operating team will focus on helping our portfolio companies grow globally, they will also be actively investing. The investing and operating teams will work very closely.”
“Young entrepreneurs could benefit from added management bandwidth in order to scale faster, tap international markets, and roll out adjacent products,” he added.
Japan-based Soft Bank Group, is known for its leadership by founder Masayoshi Son. It, now, owns operations in broadband, fixed-line telecommunications, e-commerce, internet, technology services, finance, media and marketing, semiconductor design, and other businesses.
“Globally, we have had a number of companies that have gone public—Uber, Guardant and Slack to name a few. And over the next few years, you will see more companies going public. As India grows, the plan is the same. But there’s nothing on the immediate horizon. IPOs are an important one-time decision for the company, so we will take them public when the time is right,” Varma reportedly said.
Till the date, SoftBank Vision Fund has invested in two Indian fintech startups including insurance marketplace PolicyBazaar, and digital payments unicorn Paytm.
SoftBank Vision fund was set up in 2017 with a total corpus of $100Bn. Most of this vision fund was raised from Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.
Importantly, the company has invested around $10 billion so far in Indian startups.