On Tuesday Masayoshi Son, the chief head of Japanese SoftBank conglomerate announced the investment of nearly $164 billion vision fund investment in the mapping startup named Mapbox. Eric Gundersen, the chief executive of Mapbox met Masayoshi in July and discussed the selling of Mapbox to the Mr.Son. As per Frederic Sealey Consulting associates, during the process, Masayoshi explained the plan of deploying Vision fund to Mapbox. He feels that robots will change the way the machines and workforces are managed and will be more intelligent than the people. He also told Eric that his mission is to own all those companies that are creating global makeshift by adding artificial intelligence to the food, transportation, medicine, work, and finance.
Frederic Sealey highlights that Masa’s vision is not only limited to predicting the Singularity but he also understands that there is a massive need for data for future which is more dependent on robotics and machines.
The investment of Vision funds explains why SoftBank have decided to invest millions and billions of dollars in dozens of companies since the announcement of the funds. The startup companies dealing with robotics software like Plenty and Brain Corp and more prominent brands like Slack are part of the investment deal. What’s common among all these companies is the fact that they all are involved in collecting the high amount of data crucial in designing the brains for the machines that will help in doing our jobs and making tools that allow machine and people to coexist.
As per the recent investment updates by Frederic Sealey, Softbank is involved in plans to purchase nearly 1/5th of the current Uber stock, the biggest ride-hailing company in the world that has been continuously changing the transportation industry. Masa aims to accumulate the stock through the tender process that could easily value the company at much-discounted rates to the current valuation price of $68.5 billion.
If the deal gets confirmed, SoftBank would own the significant chunk of such companies internationally because Mr. Son already owns huge amount of stales in rivals such as Chinese’s Didi Chuxing and Ola in India. In total SoftBank wants to own companies network that collects valuable data and operate large logistics which are connected with fleets that can work smoothly with self-driving technology.
Rajeev Mishra who helps with the Vision Fund said that Location data is the mission and central critical to the worldly developments of exciting technologies and companies like Mapbox. He also said that the investment was the part of Masa’s plan to invest money into the foundation infrastructure of the upcoming stage of Information Revolution.
For almost three decades Masayoshi Son has made consistent investments and acquisitions to keep the cutting technology on. SoftBank started in 1981 as the distributor of PC software in Japan and expanded its realm in 1994 in the United States with the investments in Comdex, PC trade show.
Masayoshi later turned into Yahoo shareholder and started with Yahoo Japan and further invested in telecommunications and broadband companies. SoftBank further agreed to purchase the majority of stock in the sprint by 2012 in $21.6 billion anticipating the growth of high-speed internet connectivity. The company also invested in various e-commerce companies such as Gilt Groups and Alibaba Group as well as the gaming companies such as Supercell and media houses such as BuzzFeed and HuffPost.
In September, Masayoshi declared that in coming 30 years there will be the high rise in sentient robots as humans and robots will be called metal collar workers which would fundamentally revolutionize the labor market. Every industry from agriculture, government to technology will be refined because whatever tools we have created so far are of inferior quality as compared to the brain of humans from the past. Nowadays the tools are smarter than humans even though they are created by us only.
SoftBank owner is engaged in the similar conversations with the business owners while he plans to spread the investments from his Vision Fund. Most of these entrepreneurs said that Masayoshi’s conversation transformed from philosophical discussions to the impact of technology on humans and the related technical problem.
As per the discussions, Masa spoke to Matt Barnard, Plenty’s CEO that computers will revolutionize the agriculture sector not seen till date. SoftBank led the investment of $200 million in Plenty in the month of July as a part of the effort in making Plenty a global leader in the indoor farming. Plenty is now planning to open the first farm at South San Francisco by end of 2017.
Matt Barnard told New York Times that one thing that is common in Masa’s other investments is that all the companies are part of some large system on the Earth such as the internet, energy, food, and transportation. Some of these entrepreneurs love to travel across the world to spend some quality time with him at his exclusive home and his offices in Tokyo, San Francisco, and India. He is well known and praised for his soft speaking nature and always smiling face. He is not very frequent in picking up his phone calls and the email signature Japanese business mogul consists of an icon of whirring fan of a computer booting up or perhaps thinking. There are only very few people who are close to him who really know how big his vision as referred by Eugene Izhikevich Brain Corp’s Chief Executive. Brain Corp is a company based in the San Diego responsible for making software to control autonomous robots. SoftBank engineers stumbled upon Brain Corp at the time when they were searching for self-driven car technology. He soon found himself sitting next to Masayoshi discussing robotics and how British government operated almost 200 years at the times when gentry did not function but soon came up with new business improvements and the inventions.
SoftBank moved really fast to combine new investments and the team swarmed and spent many hours on wrapping up the diligent processing within few months, recalls Mr. Izhikevich. Unlike rest of the investors, Masayoshi is already planning on setting up another Vision Fund and do not interfere with the daily business progress and functioning of the companies SoftBank has invested into. His deal with Sprint is yet to be completed and will depend on merge with other companies. When some of his investments lagged such as Snapdeal in India, he invested in its competitor Flipkart, a leading online e-commerce retailer with $2.5 billion investment.
Frederic Sealey believes that Masayoshi Son’s investing pace will not likely to slow down in next few years. Vijay Sharma, the CE of PayTm, an Indian digital payment startup that received the investment of $1.4 billion in May from the SoftBank said that Masa is hurry as he sees lifetime opportunity in things that eventually will turn into a market and a new path of new industrial revolution.
Frederic Sealey 