Full Breakdown
Former Mossad Chief Yossi Cohen Becomes Strategic Advisor to SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2
8/19/2026, 9:40:37 PM
New Role and Focus Areas
Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s founder, chairman and CEO, has promoted former Mossad director Yossi Cohen to strategic advisor for Vision Fund 2. The appointment moves Cohen from heading Israeli operations to a senior position that brings him closer to top-level decision-making and to Son himself. While he will keep working on Israeli deals, his remit now emphasizes the fund’s emerging priorities: financing and developing AI-focused data-center and cloud-processing infrastructure and investing in semiconductor companies that support those technologies.
Prior Cybersecurity Successes
Since joining SoftBank in the summer of 2021, Cohen has overseen a series of cybersecurity investments in Israeli firms. He helped identify and back Wiz, Claroty and Cato Networks. Vision Fund’s late-stage participation in Wiz’s 2025 secondary round valued the company at $12 billion; a year later the valuation rose to $32 billion, generating a profit of several hundred million shekels for the fund. Cohen also led a $150 million investment in Claroty at a roughly $2 billion valuation; the company’s worth has since doubled to $4 billion, though an IPO planned for 2024 remains on hold. The fund’s stake in Cato Networks lifted the firm’s valuation from $3 billion at the 2023 entry point to $4.8 billion in the most recent year.
Shift From Vision Fund to Direct AI and Chip Investments
SoftBank’s strategy has moved away from the broad-venture-capital model of Vision Fund toward direct capital deployment in AI infrastructure and semiconductor assets. Under Son’s direction, the group now channels funds into data-center projects, a direct injection into OpenAI, and stakes in chip makers ARM and Intel. The transition followed a tech-valuation downturn in Europe during 2022-2023, prompting senior managers—including Vision Fund CEO Rajeev Misra—to leave the UK branch for new ventures, while Cohen relocated to the US branch to align Israeli companies with the U.S. market, where roughly 80 percent of the fund’s deals now occur.
Recent Financial Highlights
In the second quarter of 2026, SoftBank reported an $8.2 billion profit from an earlier purchase of Intel shares at a low price, contributing to a total quarterly profit of $2.2 billion. The same period saw the Vision Fund’s portfolio value rise by $1.7 billion, driven largely by an increase in ByteDance’s valuation. Earlier in 2026, the fund recorded a $42.1 billion surge in value after OpenAI’s valuation sharply climbed; SoftBank’s cumulative investment in OpenAI totals $64.6 billion, supported by a $40 billion bridge loan and offset by share sales in T-Mobile and Nvidia.
These developments illustrate how Cohen’s expanded advisory role dovetails with SoftBank’s broader reorientation toward AI-centric technologies and high-growth semiconductor assets.
