SoftBank has announced almost half a billion dollars’ worth of tech investments in a diverse group of companies ranging from robotics to farming.
Vision Fund’s first investments will be in robotics company Brain Corp and agricultural technology firm Plenty.
The deals were unveiled before Thursday’s SoftBank World conference.
The Vision Fund was established late last year as a combination of equity and debt from backers including Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, as well as technology companies including Apple, Qualcomm, Foxconn and Sharp.
Son has promised to “think big” with its bets on many facets of what he calls the “information revolution”, ranging from artificial intelligence to the Internet of things.
The fund’s first deployments will set the tone, with a company using sensors and big data to create a “hyper-yield” farm and another that is hoping to become the standard operating system for autonomous robots, in the same way that Android did in smartphones.
Farming firm Plenty is raising $200m to help with what Son said was a plan to “remake the current food system”.
Chief executive and co-founder Matt Barnard said its indoor farms would produce “hyper-organic food with no pesticides or GMOs while cutting water consumption by 99 percent”.
The facilities, which grow food vertically inside towers lit by bright LEDS, will be created close to large cities to avoid having to transport and store their produce.
The Vision Fund’s other investment announced on Wednesday is a $114m bet that manually operated vehicles in warehouses and other industrial applications can be turned into autonomous robots.
San Diego-based Brain, which was first backed by chipmaker Qualcomm, offers “AI-as-a-service”. Brain’s first application was a floor-cleaning robot, but its founders say its technology will eventually be as “commonplace as computers and mobile phones are today”.
“We believe tomorrow’s robots will be intelligent autonomous machines that take care of us,” said Eugene Izhikevich, Brain’s chief executive. “This funding will allow us to accelerate our mission, and we look forward to collaborating with the SoftBank Vision Fund as a long-term strategic partner.”
Nauto, meanwhile, part of Android founder Andy Rubin’s Playground Global hardware incubator, is the latest Silicon Valley autonomous driving start-up to see a multimillion-dollar cash injection.
Its device can be installed into existing vehicles and looks inside and outside the car, to help prevent distracted driving.
Its initial target customers are fleet managers of commercial vehicles who want to track their drivers remotely and improve safety, with a longer term goal of applying the same technology to develop fully self-driving cars.
