[Bartweiss]

A six month lockup with no guarantee on the other side sounds crazy, but with a cash transfer to compensate and provide runway it looks a lot more reasonable.

(Of course, it depends a lot on the missing detail of what SoftBank took for that money in the absence of a deal. Was it a loan? A smaller investment at the same terms/valuation planned for the big one?)

[OnlineGladiator]

I'm not saying Softbank is a great fund (I've thought they made shitty investments long before the recent media frenzy in the past year), I just meant Creator isn't exactly a startup starlet that is drowning in funding opportunities. They're ~10 years old, have raised ~25 MM, and I heard their last round was already a downround (pretty bad considering how little they've raised and how long they've been around).

Looking from the outside, Creator was likely desperate for cash and happy to agree to anything - which they did. And unless they ended up with no cash at all after this brouhaha, they are probably still better off than they were initially.

And who knows - maybe Softbank will still give a stupid amount of cash to another terrible robotics startup. They've certainly done dumber things before.

[Bartweiss]

Yeah, all very true.

Out of all those stories, I'm most surprised SoftBank walked away on Seismic. Maybe they're scared that all the recent unicorns are going to lose value, but it's a pretty safe/standard company that wasn't depending on Softbank to live, and opening the Japanese market was a Softbank-specific perk.

Funding an already-unicorn at a high valuation isn't likely to get you the usual VC 10x, I guess. But it sounds like a way to help stabilize Softbank's rep with a modest win, not a risky bet to bail out of.