SoftBank Group's Vision Fund will lead a ¥13.7 billion ($101 million) Series D fundraising into Japanese startup LegalForce, in the world's biggest tech investor's fourth outlay in its home country. LegalForce, which uses AI to screen contracts for loopholes and potential legal risks, said other participants in the round include new investors Sequoia Capital China and Goldman Sachs Group, as well as existing backers Mitsubishi UFJ Capital and Mizuho Capital. This could be due to a conflict with your ad-blocking or security software. Please add japantimes.co.jp and piano.io to your list of allowed sites. If this does not resolve the issue or you are unable to add the domains to your allowlist, please see this support page.

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After a tumultuous 2019 that saw the implosion of its WeWork public offering, SoftBank's Vision Fund expects up to seven companies that it has stakes in, to go public by the end of next year, its chief executive said. In tandem, it will boost its investment in artificial intelligence and technology companies that helped propel it back into the black amid the Covid-19 pandemic. "AI is going to disrupt and be a bigger disruptor than the internet, which took 20 years to disrupt a lot of industries," SoftBank Investment Advisers chief executive Rajeev Misra said in an interview with The National. "The acceleration of disruption went up dramatically due to Covid. The market share gain achieved by many of our companies that would have taken three years to happen, happened in the last nine months. Many of our companies have huge tail winds."

SoftBank Group saw its operating income increase by 81% over the year to March 31, 2019, driven by its SoftBank Vision and Delta Funds more than tripling their operating income. Here's how it's related to artificial intelligence, how it works and why it matters. Overall, the SoftBank conglomerate took in ¥9.6 trillion in sales, an increase of 5%, from which it made ¥2.35 trillion in earnings before interest and taxes, up 81%, and ¥1.4 trillion of net income. Broken down, both of its telcos in the form of Sprint and SoftBank Corporation contributed around ¥3.7 trillion in sales, with Yahoo Japan making ¥947 billion in sales, and others making up the remaining ¥1.2 trillion. For operating income, the SoftBank Vision Fund hit ¥1.26 trillion, SoftBank made ¥725 billion, Sprint contributed ¥280 billion, and Yahoo Japan made ¥135 billion.

When Uber publicly filed for an initial public offering last week, it cemented its reputation as a technology behemoth with more than a few liabilities. One particularly weighty albatross: its Autonomous Technology Group, which since 2015 has poured hundreds of millions into building self-driving car tech it has yet to commercialize. Make that at least $1 billion: According to the filing, Uber spent $457 million in 2018 on research and development for autonomous vehicles (and its other tech moonshots, like "flying taxis")--a figure up 19 percent from 2017. So it was good news for Uber--not to mention the potential shareholders circling its IPO--when it announced a major investment into its Autonomous Technology Group from a Japanese consortium on Thursday. The $1 billion infusion comes from Toyota, the automotive supplier Denso, and the Softbank Vision Fund, which is aggressively bankrolling ambitious transportation technology companies.

Light cofounder and CEO Dave Grannan raised $121 million for his imaging platform on the promise of its value to robotics, drones, and, especially, self-driving vehicles.Courtesy of Light In February, Dave Grannan, cofounder and CEO of imaging startup Light, flew to Tokyo to meet SoftBank's Masayoshi Son for the first time since beginning conversations with the Japanese billionaire's venture-capital arm. After two more meetings, in Tokyo and Silicon Valley, Son agreed to lead a massive $121 million investment in Light, through his SoftBank Vision Fund. Leica Camera also joined the deal. A big reason that Light was able to attract so much funding is the promise of robots, drones and, especially, self-driving cars. Light uses complex algorithms to combine images from multiple camera modules into a single, high-quality image with depth.

As self-driving cars move steadily toward real-life commercial service, the companies ripping away the steering wheel are dealing with problems far more complex than telling a highway sign from a stopped firetruck. Problems like how to keep making money in a world where people are losing interest in owning, renting, and even driving cars. And they're making moves that indicate they've got answers, or at least guesses. This week, General Motors announced it's taking a $2.35 billion investment from the Softbank Vision Fund, to help its self-driving venture get to market in 2019. Alex talked to the man trying to steer Avis into the future, and we looked at the idea of automotive subscriptions.

With help from SoftBank Vision Fund, GM will launch self-driving cars with no steering wheel or pedals. SoftBank Vision Fund will invest $2.25 billion in GM Cruise Holdings, the automaker's self-driving car unit, to help commercialize GM's autonomous vehicle technology in a large-scale fleet starting next year. GM is also investing $1.1 billion in GM Cruise, strengthening its commitment to bringing self-driving cars to market in a big way. "Our Cruise and GM teams together have made tremendous progress over the last two years," said GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra. "Teaming up with SoftBank adds an additional strong partner as we pursue our vision of zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion."

It has been a year since the SoftBank Vision Fund was launched, and a pattern has emerged. Masayoshi Son has been using his nearly $100 billion armamentarium to invest in technology companies that gather user data. According to the SoftBank Group's most recent results, the fund, which marked its first anniversary on Sunday, had invested $29.7 billion by the end of March. This means about one-third of the fund's cash has been invested. The fund contributed 302.9 billion yen ($2.72 billion) to SoftBank Group operating profit for the year through March. The huge fund began with a mountain of money that was roughly equal to the total invested amounts of all the world's other venture capital funds.

In the last two months Michael Marks has turned down a dozen offers to make keynote speeches at conferences. His company, construction startup Katerra, is three years old, but the attention surge is very recent. "Construction technology has gotten kinda buzzy," he says. But more likely, interest in Katerra has spiked because in January, the company landed an astounding $867 million in venture funding led by the SoftBank Vision Fund. A deal of that size, led by the venture industry's most talked-about fund, will put a company on the map overnight.