Neil Cunha-Gomes, who focuses on EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) fintech and digital asset investments at SoftBank Vision Fund, is departing to focus on crypto, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: The Japanese giant — once a regular name in crypto mega-rounds — has turned its attention to AI and put its crypto bets on ice.
Zoom in: Cunha-Gomes is a director who has been with the Vision Fund since 2017.
- One of 15 investment professionals in EMEA, he is slated to exit in July.
- He sits on the board of U.K.-based Zopa (last valued at $1 billion) and e-commerce software company SendCloud (last valued around $750 million) and is a board observer at crypto wallet company Consensys (last valued at $7 billion).
- Those seats will be handed off to new SoftBank representatives.
The big picture: Fintech VCs are on the move. Cunha-Gomes' exit follows several others' departures.
- Former Index Ventures Mark Goldberg, known for investments in Plaid and Lithic, left his firm last year to launch an early-stage firm with Ethan Kurzweil (Bessemer Venture Partners) and Kristina Shen (Andreessen Horowitz).
- Will Szcerbiak, who leaned heavily toward enterprise fintech at Greycroft, co-founded investment fund B2R this year after Greycoft went all in on AI.
Zoom out: This also comes as the crypto industry is reawakening, with investments in tokens and equity back up 17% year to date, compared with the same period a year earlier, per data from DeFiLlama.
- An estimated $4.3 billion has been invested since Jan. 1.
The bottom line: AI isn't taking the air out of every corner of the fintech/crypto room.
SoftBank declined to comment on this report.
