Seoul-based Qraft Technologies, which uses AI to find promising stocks, raises $146M from SoftBank Group
Justin Baer / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
Qraft's $146M round extends a decade-long SoftBank habit of backing applied-AI startups in East Asia — from Quixey's search-era raise in 2015 and Appier's marketing-AI Series C in 2017 to Upstage's $27M Series A led by SoftBank Ventures Asia and VoyagerX's $27M round in 2021 — but at several times the size of any of those checks.
What makes this one different is the target: rather than selling AI tooling to other companies, Qraft uses AI to pick stocks directly, so SoftBank is buying exposure to AI-managed capital at the same moment it is building AI compute capacity (SB Neo's planned 10GW in the U.S.) and borrowing against its OpenAI stake.
First-order effects
- Qraft gets $146M to scale its AI-driven stock selection business, and SoftBank gains a direct position in AI-run asset management rather than an indirect one through enterprise AI vendors.
- For Seoul's AI founders, the round resets the local funding ceiling: Upstage and VoyagerX had closed $27M Series A rounds just months earlier with SoftBank Ventures Asia participating.
Second-order effects
- The follow-on behavior is already visible in the corpus: SBVA, formerly SoftBank Ventures Asia, came back for Upstage's $72M Series B in 2024 and the $45M bridge in 2025, suggesting SoftBank recycles its Korean AI winners across rounds instead of betting once.
- Quantitative asset managers now compete against a rival whose model development is underwritten by one of the largest AI capital deployers, pressuring firms without proprietary models toward licensing or partnership.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, SoftBank becomes the standing balance sheet for East Asian applied-AI companies across market cycles, with its own infrastructure buildout (SB Neo) creating downstream demand for the software it funds.
- The deeper structural shift is the loop between AI capital and capital managed by AI: a single group investing in AI stock-pickers while deploying tens of billions into AI compute concentrates both sides of the trade in one portfolio.
The trend: SoftBank is consolidating its role as the recurring financier of East Asia's applied-AI startups, scaling from modest Series A checks to nine-figure bets on AI that manages money itself.