Masayoshi Son dreams of himself as a visionary investor in new technologies. After all why not. At the head of the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, which he founded in 1981, combining telecoms, finance and services, he succeeded, in 2017, in setting up the largest financing fund ever formed in the field of news technologies, the Vision Fund 1, intended to finance the start-ups of the future and endowed with more than 100 billion dollars (86 billion euros). He then created a second fund, Vision Fund 2, with around forty billion dollars, in 2019.
But with what success? He whose fortune was largely based on a very good intuition – investing in the Chinese Alibaba from the beginning – seems to have lost his flair. On November 6, he attended the bankruptcy filing of WeWork, the American shared workspace giant, in which it had sunk no less than 11.5 billion dollars.
A week later, he was caught up with another unfortunate operation: his investment in the IRL messaging application, in 2021. At the time, the Vision Fund 2 took the lead in the financing round which allowed the company to raise $170 million in funding and cross the $1 billion valuation mark. For SoftBank, it is a question of banking on a potential competitor to Facebook, which has become less attractive to young audiences. IRL offers to facilitate the organization of events and meetings in the real world (“In Real Life”, IRL).
Impulsive character
The Japanese investor says he is convinced by the arguments of a young company which, he explains today, claims to have won over a quarter of Americans under 28, twelve million monthly active users, and display a growth rate of 400% per year.
Two years later, nothing is going well. In June, the company had to close its doors after a survey, commissioned by the board of directors, indicated that 95% of IRL traffic was generated by “bots”, robots generating messages on the platform. Based on this report, SoftBank filed a complaint in August against the founders of IRL, demanding to be reimbursed $150 million.
But, on November 15, the Financial Times revealed that several co-founders of IRL were in turn filing a complaint against the Vision Fund, accusing it of “blatant and scandalous lie” in order to ” destroy ” the start-up. The complaint, filed on November 10, targets the Japanese, but also other investors (Goodwater Capital, Floodgate Fund) who seek, through this maneuver, to limit their losses. In a message published on July 5 on the professional network LinkedInthe co-founder and director of IRL, Abraham Shafi, who had just arrived, was already sorry that “the expert report which is supposed to lead to the discovery [du recours à ces robots] not’[ait] not been published or shared with [lui] ».
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