SoftBank Corp founder and chief executive Masayoshi Son met top Indian startup founders and CEOs on his day-long visit to New Delhi on Tuesday, including Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Flipkart group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy and Lenskart cofounder Peyush Bansal.

ET was the first to report about his one-day visit to New Delhi on March 3. This is Son’s first trip to India in more than four years.

Sharma tweeted a picture of Son with founders and CEOs, which included Supam Maheshwari, cofounder of FirstCry; Sandeep Deshmukh, cofounder of ElasticRun; Cars24 cofounder Vikram Chopra; Bhavin Turakhia, cofounder of Zeta; and Asish Mohapatra and Ruchi Kalra, founders of OfBusiness and Oxyzo, respectively.

“Ultimate joy today, seeing Masa smiling, happy, and enjoying his India trip. Every one of us had tons of gratitude for his belief and support given to our startups,” Sharma tweeted.

Son also attended the wedding reception of Oyo founder Ritesh Agarwal on Tuesday, people in the know said. He had lunch with Agarwal and his parents earlier in the day.

According to people present at the meeting, Son told the gathering that when he started investing in India 6-7 years ago it was based on instinct. That has now transformed into a core belief and no investor can turn away from India as a market, Son is believed to have said. The India trip is significant as it comes on the back of SoftBank facing deep losses from its ambitious $100 billion Vision Fund, which has been battered by a rout in tech valuations globally amid rising interest rates, geopolitical concerns and the waning of a pandemic-led bump up in digital transformation spends.

SoftBank is one of the largest foreign investors in the Indian tech and startup sector, with $15 billion deployed here over the past decade.

During the meeting on Tuesday afternoon, Son, according to people present in the meeting, told the gathering that each crisis was an opportunity to reinvent and come back stronger, indicating that the current funding winter should not be a deterrent for startups.

Because of Covid-19 restrictions earlier, some of the founders were meeting Son for the first time. One startup founder told Son that he was a ‘Covid-baby’ for SoftBank as the investment happened during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in India.

In his chat, Son indicated that he had realised only about 1% of his vision for SoftBank and that he was reinventing himself as an entrepreneur.

Some of Son’s early big bets in India include Ola, Oyo, Paytm, Snapdeal, and Flipkart, while Lenskart, FirstCry, Meesho, Unacademy, OfBusiness, and Delhivery are among its newer investments.

Amid the broader correction in valuations of new-age technology firms, SoftBank has drastically scaled back investments to offset losses and has been offloading stakes across listed firms like Delhivery, Paytm and Policybazaar. Last week, it sold a 3.85% stake (28 million shares) in Gurugram-based Delhivery through bulk deals for Rs 954 crore.

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