SoftBank Vision Fund's Deep Nishar to leave firm by year-end

Deep Nishar, a senior managing partner at SoftBank Vision Fund, said he is leaving the firm at the end of the year.

Bloomberg was the first to report on his exit earlier this month.

Nishar made the announcement through a LinkedIn post on Monday.


"I will bid adieu to my amazing team and colleagues at the end of this year. With much gratitude for the honour and privilege of serving the SoftBank family," he said in a Twitter post.


"Deep played an important role in hiring and mentoring employees, advising our founders, and overseeing our investing activities in enterprise, frontier tech and health tech," Rajeev Misra, chief executive officer of SoftBank Investment Advisers was quoted as saying by Bloomberg on Monday.

Nishar, who leads enterprise, health tech and frontier tech investments at SoftBank Investment Advisers, has been involved in 38 of its bets, including Grofers, Deep Genomics, Eightfold AI, Fungible, Slack Technologies, among others.

He also has a strong technical background, co-authoring 14 patents, according to the company's website. He is also a recipient of the Google Founders Award (2004), which is given to employees who made extraordinary contributions to the company.

Nishar has over 20 years of experience in helping build and grow internet and software businesses. Prior to SoftBank, he served as senior vice-president of Products and User Experience at LinkedIn and held a number of leadership roles at Google.

Previously, he was the founder of enterprise software company Patkai Networks.

He is known for his stint as LinkedIn's product head, having helped the professional networking site grow from 32 million members to 347 million subscribers at the time he left. During his tenure, LinkedIn's annual revenue increased from $78 million to $2.22 billion. Nishar was hired by Nikesh Arora in 2015 as an integral part of the Japanese conglomerate's investment team.

The IIT-Kharagpur alumnus has served on several public and private company boards including Automation Anywhere, Cohesity, Elevate Bio, Encoded, Fungible, Seer, Slack, Tripadvisor, Vir, and Zymergen.

There are only three executives at the fund who outrank Nishar, including Masayoshi Son, founder and chairman of SoftBank Group Corp.

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