A year or two ago, there were warnings that the party was ending in Silicon Valley. “The crazy money is drying up,” one observer claimed. This newspaper cited “growing caution” among venture capitalists. The party may have ended, but it has been followed by a wilder, if more exclusive, after-party. While venture investment overall has been more or less constant over the past few years, slugs of cash have been shovelled into established start-ups.
Much of the shovelling has been done by the Vision Fund, a tech investment vehicle operated by SoftBank, the Japanese telecom conglomerate. It has raised $93bn, some internally and more from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi and companies such as Apple and Foxconn. The fund has wasted no time putting the money to work. More than $4bn went into the tech-flavoured real estate start-up WeWork, at a delirious valuation. Similar amounts went into publicly traded chipmaker Nvidia and Chinese ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing. The fund is angling for a large investment in the ride-hailer Uber, which is already sitting on billions in cash.
The Vision fund is not alone. Slack, which makes office messaging software, has just raised $250m, valuing the company at more than $5bn, despite not having spent any of the cash raised in its previous two rounds. Internet scrapbook’s Pinterest’s $150m fundraising set its value at $12bn. While total US VC funding fell slightly in the second quarter of this year, according to CB Insights, the amount invested in “mega-rounds” of more than $100m grew by 60 per cent.