Good news, everyone! Well, everyone who’s trying to raise capital in New York, at least.
SoftBank Capital, the investment arm of Japanese mega-carrier Softbank Corp., has just announced that they’ve raised $50 million that they plan to invest entirely into early-stage New York startups.
This new New York fund will be headed by SoftBank Capital General Partner Jordy Levy, with the funds coming from the State Of New York itself, in hopes that it’ll boost the startup ecosystem there. The one main rule of this new fund is that any company that gets investment from this fund has to call New York home — in fact, it sounds like they’ll mostly be focusing right on the core, New York City.
This is actually the third super-focused chunk of funding that SoftBank has raised this year alone. Back in February, they raised a $250M fund focused on helping established tech startups break into Asia. In April, Yahoo! Japan gave them another $20M to do the same specifically for Japan.
We spoke to Levy a bit about the investment, who tells us that this is “drop down” fund — which, in less fancy speak, mostly means that it’s a subsidiary of their bigger funding effort, and that they’re able to both back investments from the other SoftBank funds as well as invest on their own.
For those keeping track, Softbank has actually already had a few big wins come out of New York. Of the New York companies in their portfolio, Buddy Media sold to Salesforce for around $800M, OMGPOP was acquired by Zynga for $180M, Huffington Post went to AOL for $315 million, and Hyperpublic got snatched up by Groupon.
To date, Softbank Capital tells us that they have 32 active investments in New York.
