- The Japanese conglomerate, SoftBank, will invest $100 million in Miami-based startups.
- Miami Mayor Francis Suarez requested techies to relocate to Miami.
- Nico Berardi, the founder of the Miami-based fund ANIMO Projects, was part of the project.
Miami has a new check-writer in town: SoftBank, an emerging start-up center. The Japanese multinational conglomerate today revealed plans to invest $100 million in Miami-based start-ups from all its assets. Notably, the $5 billion Latin America fund of SoftBank is based in Miami, as well. SoftBank CEO Marcelo Claure is heading the initiative. The fund would help businesses that are in Miami or are planning to move there.
A SoftBank check is something of a rite-of-passage in Silicon Valley. So, the presence of the company in the scene would probably signal to others. The tax-free haven attracts swathes of nationwide investors and entrepreneurs looking to join the rising scene. Relocators include the Founders Fund’s Keith Rabois, Blumberg Capital’s David Blumberg, Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon, and Craft Ventures’ David Sacks.
Miami Mayor’s Response
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, who was on a tear on Twitter requesting techies to relocate to Miami, has led most of the drive to turn the city into an epicenter of start-ups. Since 2018, the founder of Career Karma, Ruben Harris, has been collaborating with Suarez to help people break into technology.
“We will see more funds follow their example now that Softbank has made this move, and this is a huge win for diversity not only from a race perspective. But, from a socio-economic perspective, and a gender perspective,” Harris said, who is thinking of moving to the region. Career Karma is currently working to bring old laptops into its Reskill America program with VC funds, to help prepare an emerging Miami workforce.
Monica Black, who is behind Function, a non-profit investor syndicate based in Miami, hopes that the entry of SoftBank “will not only increase the amount of capital going to local startups and help them grow to the Series A stage and beyond but will also attract other institutional VCs as co-investors.” Traditionally, she said, raising capital from Silicon Valley or New York was difficult for local startups.
SoftBank’s Incentive Packages
The new SoftBank initiative was related by Nico Berardi, the founder of the Miami-based fund ANIMO Projects, to the recent announcement by the San Francisco Founders Fund to open an office in Miami. Both are symbolic and, said Berardi, symbols matter. Here they plant a flag and say look, this is a viable scene. Berardi says out of his 16 portfolio firms, only one start-up is based in Miami. Berardi is hopeful that with more and more developers coming to the area, it will magnetize more talent to come, too.
Executives received unusual loans from the company last year to buy its shares. The four top SoftBank executives are sitting on a possible collective profit of as much as $1.2bn. In February last year. SoftBank approved incentive packages that granted more than $600 million in loans to the four men. This enabled them to purchase shares that rallied sharply. A one-year lock-up limiting the selling of some of those shares is scheduled to expire next month, giving SoftBank’s founder Masayoshi Son’s lieutenants the option of starting to cash in on the money.
