The SoftBank Corp. logo displayed on a glass door of the company’s store in Tokyo, Japan, on Wednesday, May 8, 2024. SoftBank Group Corp. is scheduled to announce its earnings figures on May 13. Photographer: Toru Hanai/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Toru Hanai | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Japanese giant SoftBank logged a 608.5 billion yen ($3.96 billion) gain on its Vision Fund tech investment arm in its fiscal second quarter ended Sept. 30, posting a steep quarterly increase after swinging back to black in the three months to June.
The broader Vision Fund segment as a whole, which also factors in non-investment performance such as administrative expenses and gains and losses attributable to third-party investors, reported a gain of 373.1 billion yen. It had declared a loss of 204.3 billion yen in the company’s first fiscal quarter.
The company attributed the lion’s share of the increase to valuation gains recorded at the SoftBank Vision Fund 1, noting higher share prices for e-commerce firm Coupang and Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Global, as well as the value increase of its investments in Chinese tech company Bytedance.
The Vision Fund 2 meanwhile saw a net loss of 232.6 billion yen, following declines in share prices including those of Norwegian robotics firm AutoStore and U.S. automation tech company Symbotic.
The Vision Fund has been cashing in on the success of the September 2023 listing of smartphone chip designer Arm Holdings, in which it owns a sweeping majority stake of around 90%.
Masayoshi Son’s tech conglomerate, has seen its share of controversial high-value investments in recent years in companies that have either collapsed or sharply marked down their valuations. It is now repositioning itself at the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom, where players like Nvidia are reaping in the rewards of meteoric demand for chips and data center GPUs.
An early investor in Yahoo! and Alibaba, Son now calls Nvidia, the $3.57 trillion U.S. titan, “undervalued” and forecasts the advent of AI that is 10,000 times smarter than humans within 10 years — amid late-September media reports that SoftBank will be investing $500 million into key artificial intelligence player OpenAI’s latest funding round.
Net sales for the SoftBank Group as a whole added 6% to 1.77 trillion yen.
The group’s print benefitted from investment gains of 1.28 trillion yen on shares of Chinese retail giant Alibaba and of 566.2 billion yen on stock of T-Mobile.
Tokyo-listed shares of SoftBank are up roughly 50% in the year to date, as of Tuesday morning. The company posted its latest quarterly earnings after the close of the Japanese bourse.
The company faces pressure from activist investor Elliott Management, which built a roughly $2 billion stake in SoftBank and pushed for a $15 billion share buyback, CNBC reported in June. The group announced in August that it would repurchase 6.8% of shares available in the company, amounting to 500 billion yen ($3.25 billion). On Tuesday, it said it had repurchased a cumulative 153.8 billion yen in shares by the end of the second quarter.
Japanese companies contended with high fluctuations over the summer quarter, amid a rapid strengthening of the yen and a dramatic sell-off of risk assets in August. Domestic markets have calmed relative to the summer turmoil, as Japan navigates its transition away from its ultra-low-rate policy — but analysts at Barclays note that the country’s economic horizon is not yet stable.
“Crucially, this volatility is likely to continue. Wage growth, particularly in the service sector, is progressing in line with the BOJ’s expectations, leading many to anticipate another interest rate hike in December 2024 or January 2025,” they wrote on Nov. 8.
Lisbon , Portugal – 12 November 2024; Dan Rogers, CEO, LaunchDarkly, on SaaS Summit stage during day one of Web Summit 2024 at the MEO Arena in Lisbon, Portugal.
Harry Murphy | Sportsfile | Getty Images
Collaboration software maker Asana said Wednesday it has chosen former Rubrik and ServiceNow executive Dan Rogers to be its new CEO, replacing co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.
Rogers will start at San Francisco-based Asana on July 21, the company announced. Rogers will leave his post as CEO of LaunchDarkly, a startup with software for carefully releasing code updates. Rogers joined LaunchDarkly in 2023.
Moskovitz co-founded Facebook parent Meta before leaving to start Asana in 2008. In March, Asana said he would retire. Moskovitz will continue as chair of Asana’s board of directors as the company works to diversify with artificial intelligence tools. Asana’s AI Studio software generated over $1 million in annualized revenue during the April quarter.
“This moment represents an unprecedented opportunity for AI to evolve the way people work, and Dan is the leader with the experience, vision, and expertise needed to guide Asana into its next chapter,” Moskovitz said in a statement. “I am excited to support Dan.”
Moskovitz, whom Bloomberg estimates is worth over $11 billion, has received $5 in total compensation for the past five fiscal years. Rogers, by contrast, will receive a $650,000 base salary and $35 million in restricted stock units. Rogers will also be eligible for a $650,000 annual target bonus.
Before joining LaunchDarkly, Rogers ran marketing at ServiceNow and Symantec, and he held roles at Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Salesforce. He arrived at LaunchDarkly after spending three years as president of data management software company Rubrik.
After going public through a direct listing in 2020, Asana saw shares rise during the pandemic, alongside other software stocks. The stock price gradually drifted downward, and Moskovitz bought up more and more of the company. On Wednesday, the stock closed at $12.93 per share, down from its record close of $142.68 in November 2021. Moskovitz owns about 39% of outstanding Asana shares, according to FactSet.
The stock was unchanged after hours following the CEO announcement.
LaunchDarkly said its chief revenue officer, Marcus Holm, is becoming the startup’s president, and co-founder and former CEO, will be more involved day to day as the board conducts a CEO search.
“”We’re grateful for the leadership Dan has brought to LaunchDarkly and the role he’s played in helping scale the business,” a spokesperson said.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is seen on stage next to a small robot during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that, other than artificial intelligence, robotics represents the chipmaker’s biggest market for potential growth, and that self-driving cars would be the first major commercial application for the technology.
“We have many growth opportunities across our company, with AI and robotics the two largest, representing a multitrillion-dollar growth opportunity,” Huang said on Wednesday, at Nvidia’s annual shareholders meeting, in response to a question from an attendee.
A little over a year ago, Nvidia changed the way it reported its business units to group both its automotive and robotics divisions into the same line item. In May, Nvidia said that the business unit had $567 million in quarterly sales, or about 1% of the company’s total revenue. Automotive and robotics was up 72% on an annual basis.
Nvidia’s sales have been surging over the past three years due to unyielding demand for the company’s data center graphics processing units (GPUs), which are used to build and operate sophisticated AI applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Total sales have soared from about $27 billion in its fiscal 2023 to $130.5 billion last year, and analysts are expecting nearly $200 billion in sales this year, according to LSEG.
The stock climbed to a record on Wednesday, lifting Nvidia’s market cap to $3.75 trillion, putting it just ahead of Microsoft as the most valuable company in the world.
While robotics remains relatively small for Nvidia at the moment, Huang said that applications will require the company’s data center AI chips to train the software as well as other chips installed in self-driving cars and robots.
Huang highlighted Nvidia’s Thrive platform of chips, and software for self-driving cars, which Mercedes-Benz is using. He also said that the company recently released AI models for humanoid robots called Cosmos.
“We’re working towards a day where there will be billions of robots, hundreds of millions of autonomous vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of robotic factories that can be powered by Nvidia technology,” Huang said.
Nvidia has increasingly been offering more complementary technology alongside its AI chips, including software, a cloud service, and networking chips to tie AI accelerators together. Huang said Nvidia’s brand is evolving, and that it’s better described as an “AI infrastructure” or “computing platform” provider.
“We stopped thinking of ourselves as a chip company long ago,” Huang said.
At the annual meeting, shareholders approved the company’s executive compensation plan and reelected all 13 board members. Outside shareholder proposals to produce a more detailed diversity report and change shareholder meeting procedure did not pass.
Republic, a New York-based investment startup, is offering users exposure to SpaceX by issuing a “tokenized” representation of its shares.
The company will begin selling the digital tokens this week and eventually plans to expand the offering to other private companies like artificial intelligence darlings OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Stripe, X, Waymo, Epic Games and more. The Wall Street Journal first reported the story Wednesday.
“We’re talking about delivering products to retail investors that they’ve have been held out of previously,” Republic co-CEO Andrew Durgee told CNBC. “The fact that retail investors couldn’t own pre-IPO SpaceX has always been crazy to us. Now that’s going to be attached to the upside of these pre-IPO businesses. The businesses that we target out of the gate we want to have a retail focus, or at least significant retail following.”
In the crypto world, tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The move comes as the U.S. crypto industry is testing new regulatory boundaries under President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto administration. Since he took office, the Securities and Exchange Commission has moved swiftly to loosen the restraints left on the crypto industry by the previous administration, ending an enforcement case against Coinbase; closing investigations into Robinhood Crypto, Uniswap, Gemini and Consensys without enforcement action; scaling back its crypto enforcement unit; declaring meme coins are not securities and launching a Crypto Task Force that’s been holding a series of roundtables on crypto asset regulation.
“If you take a step back and look at what the last four to eight years looked like in the space, innovation was very stifled,” Durgee said. “The reality is the space was just difficult for most to understand and consume. Now we’ve gotten to a point where it’s certainly become more mainstay.”
“We’ve moved from what was ultimately … nothing but headwinds,” he added. “And now we’re finally in a place industrywide, where we actually have tailwinds and we have some room to really innovate.”
Republic will allow investors to invest between $50 and $5,000 in the tokens. Typically, those wanting to invest in private companies are required to meet a minimum closer to $10,000 and need to meet specific income or net-worth requirements. Shares of private company can be exchanged by accredited investors in secondary markets; Republic will initially price SpaceX tokens based on how the company’s shares are performing there.
Tokenized private equity is new territory for regulators and the underlying companies being digitally represented. There are outstanding questions about the legality of the tokens, how Republic will give financial information to investors as required, and how selling private investments to retail investors could provoke stress in the financial markets.
“We don’t need a company’s approval to be able to do these types of offerings, and I do think there will be some companies that will want more control over something like that,” Durgee said. “The reality is the structure that we’re using, which was built on securities law from the 1930s, in a lot of instances allows us the leeway to give these types of offerings. People are going to really have to start to question how they’re going to approach some of these innovations, and how far they will want to push that risk envelope.”
Financial institutions are becoming increasingly interested in tokenizing traditional assets because of the often-touted benefits of blockchain technology: lower costs, faster settlement times, greater transparency about ownership and performance and programmable terms, as well as increased accessibility for retail investors and global reach.
The announcement comes about a week after Coinbase said it’s pushing for SEC approval to offer trading of tokenized public stocks, which would give the crypto services provider an additional revenue stream and put it in closer competition with brokerages like Robinhood and eToro.
Competing crypto exchange Kraken recently said it’ll offer tokens of U.S. stocks for 24/7 trading in unspecified markets abroad.