Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen joined Japanese investment fund SoftBank five years ago as the head of Israeli operations within the partnership established by Vision Fund 2. Now Cohen has been appointed by the fund's founder, chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son as strategic advisor, "Globes" has learned. He now holds a more senior position that brings him closer to the top decision-making levels in the organization and to Son himself.
Cohen will continue to operate in the Israeli market but will focus more on the fund's new areas of activity: financing and developing data centers for AI and cloud processing and investing in chip companies in that field. According to senior executives in the tech industry, Cohen spends extended periods in the US and Europe meeting with executives in the field and taking his first steps, but there has not yet been a known investment in which he actively participated.
He was mainly involved in cybersecurity investments
Since Cohen joined SoftBank, he has mainly been involved in investments in cybersecurity companies. Concentrating on the Israeli market, he has been responsible for identifying new investment opportunities, and participated in investments in companies such as Wiz, Claroty and Cato Networks. The three investments have turned out to be a successful bet for Vision Fund, which joined the investment in Wiz at a late stage - in the secondary fundraising in 2025, and purchased shares in the company at a valuation of $12 billion - selling at a major profit at a company valuation of $32 billion about a year later, raking in a profit of several hundred million shekels.
Previously, Cohen led an investment at the end of 2021 of $150 million in cybersecurity company for industrial plants and physical infrastructures Clarity at a valuation of about $2 billion, according to PitchBook. This, while merging into Israeli company Medigate, which specializes in protecting medical equipment in hospitals.
Although SoftBank did not continue to invest in the company in recent years, Claroty's valuation has doubled to $4 billion, with the company even considering an IPO, although the move has since been frozen. The investment in Shlomo Kramer's Cato Networks also led to an increase in valuation. The company did consider an IPO in 2024, but even in raising private capital, its valuation has increased from $3 billion at the time of SoftBank's first investment in 2023 to $4.8 billion last year.
Even before Cohen joined SoftBank, it had made a number of investments in Israel - some of them successful - including in Lemonade and eToro, which both held successful Wall Street IPOs, while several other investments led to write offs including Cybereason which was taken over by Steven Mnuchin's Liberty Fund, and was eventually sold to Levelblue for a low amount that was never disclosed. The fund also made write-offs in its investments in the Israeli companies StreamElements and Rapid API. In these investments, SoftBank was perceived as an active and dominant fund that was not afraid to quickly make changes to management and even to product development strategy.
Masayoshi Son decided to change direction
Cohen has enhanced his role in the fund after the changes that took place at Vision Fund, the SoftBank subsidiary that reached the end of its cycle, when he joined the fund five years ago at the height of the tech boom in the summer of 2021, Cohen operated under the guidance of its UK branch, which was then managed by senior investors from Deutsche Bank who were recruited by Son to manage investments in Europe and the Middle East. -
With the onset of the tech crisis in Europe, which led to a decline in valuations and the abandonment of investors throughout the industry in 2022-2023, senior managers, including the fund's CEO, Rajeev Misra, Cohen’s direct manager, left the UK branch to found an investment fund in the UAE, and Cohen moved to work under Vision Fund’s US branch. He explained the move by the fact that Israeli companies are anyway striving to grow in the US market and that 80% of the fund's deals were in the US.
In recent years, Masayoshi Son, the fund's charismatic founder and CEO, has decided to shift the focus of the company's investments from Vision Fund - which was characterized by the dispersion of large capital in many investments in a classic venture capital model, to direct investments by SoftBank's parent company in data centers, AI infrastructure and direct capital injection into OpenAI, chip company ARM and Intel. Dozens of managers have left Vision Fund and turned to other investment ventures, and those who remain are engaged in managing existing investments, including giant companies like TikTok operator ByteDance and OpenAI.
The value increased thanks to OpenAI and TikTok
The IPO of ARM, which is still controlled by SoftBank, is considered one of the best chip company flotations in recent years, with its stock rising 400% in just two years. Earlier this month, SoftBank reported a profit of $8.2 billion from an investment in shares Intel made when the stock was at its lowest, which brought the fund's total profit to $2.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026.
The value of the Vision Fund, a SoftBank subsidiary, recorded a $1.7 billion increase in the value of its investments in the second quarter of 2026 due to the rise in ByteDance’s valuation. SoftBank also holds shares of OpenAI through Vision Fund 2 but unusually did not report a change in profit or loss from the company's operations in the second quarter. But in the first quarter of 2026 reported a $42.1 billion rise in the fund's value due to a sharp increase in OpenAI’s valuation.
In the preceding quarter, SoftBank had reported that the valuation of its investment in the AI giant was nearly $80 billion, after investing $34.6 billion. In total, SoftBank pledged to invest $64.6 billion in Sam Altman's company and raised a $40 billion bridge loan and sold shares in T-Mobile and Nvidia.
No response to this report has been forthcoming from Yossi Cohen and SoftBank.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on August 18, 2026.
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