. By the end of last year, the fund had invested $80.5 billion since its inception in 2017 and had seen a return of $9.5 billion in the form of both realized and unrealized gains. By contrast, one year earlier, at the end of 2018, the fund had invested $46.7 billion and had seen a $12.9 billion gain.
But the Vision Fund isn't like other venture funds, either in size or in strategy. A big part of SoftBank's master plan with the fund was to invest in very late stage companies not long before they were ready to go public. In that way, it resembles private equity funds, which tend to bet on surer things, than a typical venture fund, said Sean Foote, a member of the professional faculty at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
That seems to be the attitude of many investors. SoftBank has a market capitalization of around $105 billion. But its investment in Alibaba alone is worth more than that, and the Japanese conglomerate owns much more than that including chip design company ARM and a controlling stake in wireless carrier Sprint, which is close to being acquired by T-Mobile in a deal that was originally pegged at nearly $27 billion.
What's more, the fund has dozens of investments. Some of those have already paid off, including Guardant Health. Others, such as DoorDash, still could.Despite everything that's gone on lately, the fund's performance has actually improved in recent months, according to SoftBank. Thanks largely to a recovery in Uber's share price, the Vision Fund's overall return has improved by about $3 billion since the end of the year, it said.