Japan’s tech investment major SoftBank was likely to announce a $30 billion Vision Fund (SVF) for its second edition by the first quarter of next year, The Economic Times reported

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According to the report, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 was expected to be much smaller compared to its maiden corpus of $100 billion.

Rajeev Misra, CEO of SoftBank Vision Fund, said after startup WeWork fiasco, SoftBank was recalibrating its strategy to focus on mid-stage growth companies which have a positive top line and spent longer periods of time in due diligence before backing these firms.

Valuations of tech startups were already being readjusted, Misra was quoted as saying. Misra said: “When you are making so many investments in such little time, you are trusting the data as the time spent on diligence is limited. We learnt a lot. Investing is a patient, long-term process, it is not about the speed of deployment, and Masa (Masayoshi Son, founder & CEO of SoftBank Group) is himself saying this. We are strengthening things like governance and rights in portfolio companies.”

The Group had deployed $80 billion across 88 investments so far from its first fund and returned $10 billion to its sponsors, the report said.

“We should return another $5 billion by February. Our portfolio is up 15% while adjusting for WeWork and Uber. All of this despite taking a $3 billion hit on WeWork,” Mishra added.

The report stated that 25 percent of SoftBank’s portfolio may have underperformed, but that was normal in the investing world.

First Published:Dec 24, 2019 9:32 AM IST