SoftBank invests $1bn in OneWeb satellite start-up
Founder Son says this is first step in commitment of $50bn and 50,000 jobs for US
The latest funding round, which also includes $200m from existing investors, will give OneWeb, which competes with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, fresh capital to launch a satellite network to provide affordable internet access to remote parts of the world.
Last year, the US venture raised $500m from a group of investors including US chipmaker Qualcomm, the European aerospace group Airbus, Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin, and Bharti, the Indian conglomerate.
SoftBank, which also owns US wireless carrier Sprint and British chip designer Arm Holdings, joins OneWeb’s investor list with a purchase of nearly a 40 per cent stake in the company.
In a statement, Masayoshi Son, the billionaire founder of the Japanese group, stressed that the deal was in line with a pledge he made to bring $50bn and 50,000 new jobs to the US over the next four years, in a meeting he held with the US president-elect earlier this month.
“This is the first step in that commitment,” Mr Son said.
The two companies said the $1.2bn investment would be used to construct a satellite production facility in Florida and was expected to generate nearly 3,000 jobs in the US by 2020.
“With this new round of funding and based on our rapid technical progress over the past year, we also announce a much larger goal: to fully bridge the digital divide by 2027, making internet access available and affordable for everyone,” Greg Wyler, OneWeb’s founder, wrote on the company’s homepage.
OneWeb’s new facility, which will begin production in 2018, will aim to build 15 satellites per week “at a fraction of the cost of what any satellite manufacturing facility in the world can produce today”, the company said.
For Mr Son, the deal fits into his ambition to position SoftBank for the next technological tide of the “Internet of Things”, with billions of connected devices. In July, the group agreed to acquire Arm, whose chip designs lie at the heart of almost every smartphone sold today, for $32bn.
In October, SoftBank also announced a technology fund, the SoftBank Vision Fund, which will invest as much as $100bn around the world, in partnership with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
While the latest OneWeb deal is separate from the tech fund due to be launched next year, most of the promised $50bn investment in US start-ups is expected to be carried out through this fund.