Nagraj Kashyap
Managing Partner at Softbank Investment Advisers
When word got out that Nagraj Kashyap was leaving Microsoft for SoftBank Investment Advisers last year, it quickly became headline news.
After all, the then-global head of Microsoft’s M12 venture fund had both founded and spearheaded the tech giant’s investment arm, which backed more than 100 startups globally, including five unicorns in five years. He’d also made a name for himself increasing venture capital funding access for women and members of underrepresented communities in the process, working with big-name partners such as Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures.
Now, Kashyap leads the consumer practice for SoftBank’s Vision Fund, and has become known as a VC king.
“I get to be part of an organization that helps companies build on their strengths faster and more effectively than we could have imagined, even just a few years ago,” Kashyap writes in his website bio. “For me, the excitement of working at this scale is matched by the opportunity to unite the consumer and enterprise investing that I’ve done at different points in my career. I’ve been training all of my life for a job where I can bring all these pieces together.”
In April this year, he led SoftBank’s $185 million investment in Pax8, which valued the company at $1.7 billion.
Denver-based startup Pax8 works with small businesses to help them manage outsourced cloud technology services. In an interview with Bloomberg, Kashyap said SoftBank made the investment because of the difficulties small businesses face trying to figure out what technology they need as they grow — something he is well versed in through his extensive experience investing in small startups ripe for expansion.
“We know the pain firsthand of what [small and midsize businesses] go through,” Kashyap told Bloomberg at the time of the investment. “It’s not easy to understand what to buy, or how to buy it.”
Prior to working at Microsoft, Kashyap spent 13 years at Qualcomm Ventures, joining as a founding partner and later becoming the fund’s global head. There, he led more than $1 billion of noteworthy investments — including Zoom’s first institutional round of funding — and made savvy early bets on companies including Fitbit, which was acquired by Google in January 2021 for $2.1 billion. —C.C.
