The top financial officer at SoftBank Group’s Vision Fund investment division is heading for the exit after roughly ten years with the organization, according to an internal company memo obtained by Reuters.
Navneet Govil, who held the role of chief financial officer at SoftBank Investment Advisors, is departing the firm. Alex Clavel, the CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisors, authored the memo and indicated that further details about the handover of responsibilities would be shared at an appropriate time.
SoftBank Vision Fund declined to offer any comment on the matter. Reuters is the first outlet to report on the departure.
Govil originally came on board at SoftBank in 2016, arriving a full year before the debut of the first Vision Fund — a vehicle that shook up the startup investment landscape through a series of bold, high-stakes bets on emerging companies.
Some of those investments paid off handsomely, while others turned into costly setbacks. Office-sharing company WeWork stands out as one of the more notable disappointments, as a number of once-celebrated startups fell out of favor with the broader market.
In recent years, the Vision Fund has gone through rounds of layoffs and internal restructuring. SoftBank’s founder and CEO Masayoshi Son has increasingly redirected the company’s attention toward artificial intelligence-related investments.
Vision Fund 2, which launched in 2019 with a focus on earlier-stage tech companies, has since become the vehicle holding SoftBank’s significant stake in OpenAI, the company behind the widely-used ChatGPT platform.
