SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son announced on Thursday that the Japanese tech giant has formed a joint venture in the country with Chicago-based health technology company Tempus. Together, the pair plans to develop an AI-powered, data-analyzed personal medical service in Japan under the name SB Tempus.
The company plans to start in oncology. Cancer remains the biggest cause of death in Japan, according to Son, whose father died last year of the disease.
This move emphasizes Son’s ambition, focusing more on AI. Today, during an ad-hoc press conference, he filled in some details about a more specific application re: the medical industry.
SoftBank’s relationship with Tempus precedes the current JV news. It invested $200 million in Tempus in April, ahead of Tempus’ Nasdaq debut earlier this month. Tempus, once valued at $8.1 billion in 2022, raised nearly $411 million at a valuation of more than $6 billion through an IPO. However, the value has not stopped: the current market cap is $4.5 billion.
The US-based genomic testing and data analysis company was started by serial entrepreneur and billionaire Groupon founder Eric Lefkofsky in 2015 after noticing that doctors were not relying on data during his wife’s breast cancer treatment.
Tempus competes with industries such as Foundation Medicine, which uses big data to analyze tumors, and Guardant Health, a biotech company that sells blood tests to track and potentially detect cancer.
SB Tempus will be the vehicle for Tempus to bring data-driven medical technology to Japan. Tempus will “build clinical sequencing capabilities, manage patient data, and build a real-world data business in Japan”, and Son said SB Tempus will provide genomic testing, aggregation and analysis of medical data (genomic, clinical, pathology, and imaging data), and AI insights for personalized care and therapy.
Both companies have made huge investments in this venture. SoftBank and Tempus, respectively, hold a 50% stake, with SoftBank set to inject 30 billion yen, equivalent to about $188 million, Son said on stage at a media briefing.
SB Tempus, which will start operations in August, will offer three medical services to hospitals using AI to analyze personal medical data at the beginning of the year, according to Son.
How it works: The JV company will start collecting and analyzing patient genetic data from Japanese hospitals and universities. The data, which will include genomic, pathological, clinical information, and photographic images, will be used to train AI patterns for patients in Japan. The company will provide hospitals with processed data for clinical use, and its AI offering will suggest the best treatment for patients.
Son stated that in Japan, only about 1% of patients have experience with genomic testing. In comparison, about 30% have the opportunity to receive genomic testing in the US.
As well as fighting cancer, the plan is to develop other diseases, such as neuropsychology, radiology, and cardiology.
The announcement comes about a week after the Japanese tech giant’s CEO made a special public appearance last Friday at the group’s annual meeting.
Son said AI will be 10,000 times smarter than humans in a decade and put out a vision for the world featuring Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) at the meeting. He also mentioned that SoftBank’s past investments were “just a warm-up” for its ambitions to create the AI era.
Son reiterated how AI will benefit humanity in various sectors, adding medicine as one example. SoftBank is reportedly one of the companies interested in investing in Perplexity AI, a US-based AI company, at a valuation of $3 billion through Vision Fund 2, according to a Bloomberg report today. TechCrunch was the first to report on the round in April.)
A series of losses at SoftBank’s investment arm Vision Fund led the Japanese tech mogul to switch to “defensive mode” and take a more conservative investment strategy. Now it seems that SoftBank, which has billions of dollars in its war chest, is now ready to work quickly to invest in AI.
