Real estate tech company Cadre, which is owned in part by President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, has reportedly sought an investment of $100M from SoftBank Vision Fund.
The fund, set up by Japan-based SoftBank, received about half its capital from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, and another share from the United Arab Emirates' sovereign wealth fund.
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A top Cadre executive met recently in private with SoftBank, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources familiar with the discussions. Kushner himself, who is not active in the management of Cadre, did not take part in the discussions.
Cadre was co-founded by Kushner and his brother Joshua, as well as CEO Ryan Williams. Its goal is to offer commercial real estate investors a streamlined process of buying shares in buildings rather than entire buildings or putting money in REITs. Toward that end, the company recently unveiled a machine-learning approach to finding solid markets for investment.
Other deep-pocketed investors have ponied up for a stake in Cadre. Early this year, Goldman Sachs invested $250M in the company.
An investment in Cadre would not be out of character for the Vision Fund, which was founded in 2016 by CEO Masayoshi Son and which has about $98B to invest.
The fund tends to favor startups aiming to disrupt one industry or another, such as ride-hailing companies Uber and China's Didi Chuxing, co-working company WeWork, food delivery provider DoorDash and VR infrastructure specialist Improbable. It even invested in an on-demand dog walking app and dog care startup called Wag.
Since Kushner still has a stake in Cadre — worth $5M to $25M, according to Bloomberg — an investment by Vision Fund, and indirectly by Middle Eastern sovereign wealth, raises questions of conflicts of interest due to his relationship to Trump and his formal position in the U.S. government.
Kushner's founding investment into Cadre was through his company, BFPS Ventures, and he did not initially disclose that in 2017 when he became a senior adviser to the president.
As yet, SoftBank has reportedly made no final decision on any investment in Cadre.
