SoftBank
More info
- Creator
- Masayoshi Son
- Released
- 1981
- Type
- Conglomerate / holding company
- Headquarters
- Tokyo
- Website
- group.softbank
The Japanese software distributor that became a telecom giant and then the world's most dramatic venture capitalist.
Founded in 1981 in Tokyo by Masayoshi Son as a distributor of computer software — hence the name. It bought its way into becoming one of Japan's major mobile carriers (acquiring Vodafone Japan in 2006) and pushed into the US via Sprint. But Son is best known as an investor: an early stake in Alibaba became one of the most profitable bets in history, while the Vision Fund — a roughly $100 billion vehicle backed by Saudi money — both inflated and sank companies like WeWork.
SoftBank bought British chip architect ARM in 2016 for $32 billion; a planned onward sale to Nvidia collapsed in 2022. The group gets described, by turns, as a telecom company and as a hedge fund in a trench coat.