“The Opportunity Growth Fund will be the biggest fund providing capital to black Americans and people of color,” SoftBank COO Marcelo Claure said in a letter to employees. The fund is the first to be created in the wake of protests against the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black people. Claure told CNBC it was created in the past 24 hours after a conversation with SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son. (Axios, CNBC)

Talking point: SoftBank is launching the fund amid backlash against its other investment practices, and its own share of racial controversy. Last month, the CEO and founder of Banjo, a SoftBank portfolio company, resigned after it was revealed that he was an active member of white supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan. SoftBank said that it will not take a management fee for transactions out of the Opportunity Growth Fund, “but instead will seek to put as much capital as possible into the hands of founders and entrepreneurs of color.” Black Silicon Valley executives Stacy Brown-Philpot, CEO of TaskRabbit, and Paul Judge, co-founder of TechSquare Labs and Pindrop, will serve as “founding members” and “fund advisors.” SoftBank’s fund could be a marker for change to come: currently just one per cent of VC-backed founders surveyed between 2013 and 2018 were Black, with SoftBank itself committing to “do better at hiring underrepresented groups for open roles at SoftBank and our portfolio companies—especially for leadership and board seats.”