Singapore-based dtcpay has closed a $25 million Series A, with Japan’s SBI Group joining as a strategic investor through SBI Ventures Asset and the SBI-NTU-Kyobo Digital Innovation Fund, alongside Genedant Capital and existing backer Kwee Liong Tek. The round was originally anchored by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India earlier this year. dtcpay holds licenses from the Monetary Authority of Singapore and an Electronic Money Institution license in Luxembourg, and runs infrastructure that lets merchants and individuals accept, hold and convert stablecoins against fiat in real time, including a Visa-linked card and integration with more than 700 wallets through WalletConnect. “We did not raise this round to sustain what we have built. We raised it to fundamentally change how money moves across borders,” said Alice Liu, dtcpay’s founder and chief executive, in the company’s announcement.
The story here is not the funding total, which is modest next to the nine-figure raises crypto infrastructure firms have posted this year, in a stablecoin market this publication has described as splitting into two distinct camps. It is who is writing the check. SBI Group is one of Japan’s largest financial conglomerates, and a strategic investment from a regulated incumbent into a licensed stablecoin payments processor signals that Asian banks now see compliant stablecoin rails as infrastructure worth owning a stake in, not a category to watch from the sidelines. SBI Ven Capital chief executive Eiichiro So called dtcpay “the region’s leading regulated payment infrastructure bridging traditional payments and stablecoins,” language that reads as much like a partnership pitch as an investment thesis.
The original insight is what this does to the competitive map. dtcpay’s approach, licensed rails plus a card product, sits closer to the model this publication described when Circle acquired Tazapay’s local payout capability than to the pure-crypto exchanges chasing the same corridors. With a regulated Japanese conglomerate now inside the cap table, dtcpay gains a credible route into Japan’s famously conservative banking relationships, a market that has been difficult for stablecoin-native firms to enter without exactly this kind of local sponsor.
Source: PR Newswire
