SoftBank’s new $100 billion investment fund is sending a massive check to the office rental startup WeWork in an outlay of cash that shows just how much power SoftBank has accumulated in Silicon Valley.
A SoftBank fund has made its largest U.S. investment: $4.4 billion in WeWork
$4.4 billion to one company.
SoftBank said Thursday that it would invest $4.4 billion in WeWork in part from its so-called Vision Fund, the fund’s largest U.S. investment to date. The deal routes $3 billion to WeWork through both a purchase of new shares and of existing ones currently held by other investors.
The mere scale at which SoftBank plays has shaken investors in recent months. Venture funds typically run in the hundreds of million of dollars, not hundreds of billions — and so the enormous amount of cash that SoftBank must dispense quickly has led to a few mammoth investments.
Private investors now value WeWork at around $21 billion, a figure that was first disclosed earlier this summer when some initial details of the $4.4 billion investment emerged. Only two privately held companies, Uber and Airbnb, are worth more.
An additional $1.4 billion is headed to WeWork’s subsidiaries in Asia. Two senior SoftBank executives, Ron Fisher and Mark Schwartz, are going to join WeWork’s board.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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