SoftBank Vision Fund Led $111M Deal With Brazilian Delivery Startup Loggi

On Tuesday, Crunchbase surfaced a $111 million funding round by a Brazilian startup led by the SoftBank Vision Fund (SBVF).

According to the funding round data captured by Crunchbase, the Vision Fund led a $111 million Series D round raised by Sao Paulo-based Loggi, a provider of on-demand same-day logistics services in Brazil. Bloomberg Quint and Folha de S.Paolo, a local Brazilian newspaper, picked up the round as well.

On Wednesday, Crunchbase News confirmed that the Vision Fund invested in Loggi’s round and contributed $100 million to the deal. The source made no comment about the total amount raised in the offering.

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Local investor Kaszek Ventures also participated in the round. Crunchbase data indicates that the funding actually closed in March, but was just announced today, on October 16th.

Temporally, this roughly aligns with mid-March reporting from Bloomberg which suggested that SoftBank was planning to invest between $100 million and $150 million in Loggi. That report cited an unnamed source who said the deal wasn’t finalized and could fall through at the time of reporting.

SBVF has invested in a number of other global companies with direct or indirect ties to the same-day logistics space this year, including China-based Manbang Group (in which SBVF led a $1.9 billion private equity round in April), DoorDash (SBVF invested in its $535 million Series D in March). It also has put  money in Uber and Grab, both of which have food delivery components to their businesses.

The new capital puts Loggi’s total raise to date at $144 million. The $111 million raise is what we call a supergiant round—a growing, and busy segment of the venture capital universe. The SBVF has been a leading light in the growth of such super late stage rounds. There’s no doubt that the impacts of its fund size, valuation aggression, and investment cadence has changed the venture market.

However, while $100 million and larger rounds are becoming globally common, their distribution is not uniform. The United States and China command the lion’s share of the capital varietal, for example. Latin America, in contrast, sports a relative dearth of supergiant checks.

That makes the Loggi round all the more notable. A $100 million check in Brazil is news.

The round is likely welcome news for current Loggi shareholders, including capital giants like Dargoneer, and corporate players like Qualcomm and Microsoft that have previously contributed capital to the startup. Local players DOMO Invest and Iporanga Investments led the firm’s seed round. SoftBank, therefore, may be helping the local venture scene as it looks for its own returns—everyone loves a markup.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias