Masayoshi Son has sharply accelerated the pace of his startup investments this year, quintupling the number of companies in his Vision Fund 2 portfolio in less than nine months. The founder of SoftBank Group Corp. has cut 115 deals this year, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data released by the company. That is more than the combined number of deals the first Vision Fund made since its start in 2017, showing Son remains confident in his investing capability despite blunders with office-sharing service WeWork and financier Greensill. The faster pace of deal-making is sure to raise questions about whether Son is risking similar missteps, especially as a string of high-profile departures depletes top talent at the Vision Fund. Seven managing partners have left since March of last year, and last week Deep Nishar, the sole senior managing partner and leading authority on AI, said he would depart by the end of the year.

SoftBank Corp.'s fifth-generation wireless service in Japan is living up to the hype in at least one respect -- internet speeds that are blazingly fast even by the standards of one of the most connected countries in the world. The carrier's month-old 5G network topped out at 1.1 gigabits per second for downloads and about 30 megabits for uploads in tests carried out by Bloomberg News in Tokyo. Speeds of this kind, far surpassing typical wired broadband connections, have previously been possible only by pushing a fiber optic cable directly into a user's home. But there are significant pieces still missing and preventing mass adoption: Coverage is severely limited for now, there's little in the way of appealing content to capitalize on all that extra bandwidth and mobile data plans have yet to be revised to account for the much-increased consumption that 5G portends. SoftBank and local rivals KDDI Corp. and NTT Docomo Inc. all launched their 5G offerings in late March in a handful of metropolitan areas around the country, while newcomer Rakuten Inc. has targeted June for launch.