The makeover of Softbank, in the wake of COO Marcelo Claure's resignation over a compensation dispute, is hard to miss. Last month, the firm changed the structure of one of Claure's most notable contributions, a $100 million growth fund for founders of color, to .
The firm announced that it is transforming its Latin American investment arm into a new autonomous entity, called Upload Ventures, which will back early-stage companies in LatAm with around $100 million a year.
As mentioned, the move comes about six months after Claure reportedly pushed for the Latin American arm to be spun off and clashed with SoftBank executives. At the time, SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son said Bloomberg that "there was no discussion about the separation of the Latin American Fund from SoftBank."
SoftBank says managing partners Rodrigo Baer, Marco Camhaji and Norberto Giangrande created Upload Ventures. Last September, Baer and Camhaji were hired as part of the fund's strategy to focus more on early stage investments in the region. At the time, SoftBank said they would report to Claure, who noted that the firm's Latin American fund had invested in more than two-thirds of the nearly two dozen unicorns in the region.
The move was important because the hires represented an expansion of SoftBank LatAm Fund's mandate and meant the firm now supported companies at all stages of the region.
Early-stage companies that SoftBank Latin America Fund has invested in so far will migrate to Upload Ventures. Those startups include Abstra, Arch, Birdie, BotCity, Digibee, D-Uma, Indaband, Medway, Neivor, Nilo, Salu, and Worc, among others. The 12-person SoftBank Latin America Fund team is also migrating. Giangrande, an investor who has backed Nubank for example, joins Upload as a new venture partner.
Paulo Passoni and Shu Nyatta, managing partners of the SoftBank Latin America Fund, commented that the move was inspired by the "great success" of the original fund, "in just over six months of operation, we received more than 1.100 proposals and announced investments in twelve companies with great growth potential.
Since 2019, the Japanese conglomerate has invested billions of dollars in the region. Claure anticipated that by 2023, SoftBank would invest close to $30 billion a year in the region.
It's not often that a dedicated fund becomes an independent venture company; although there are examples with GV-spin-out Plexo Capital and NEA-spin-out NewView Capital. It makes sense for ambitious investors to incubate funds within an institutional partner for a few years while the company gets a good look at new deals.
Now, as a spin-out, Upload Ventures can add money from new investors to its investment balance sheet and perhaps build a brand separate from the conglomerate. Since SoftBank remains Upload's largest limited partner, it can keep an eye on the Latin American markets, from a different angle.
