dtcpay's Series A Reaches $25M as SBI Group Joins the Round

dtcpay, the Singapore company that builds stablecoin payment plumbing for merchants, has taken its Series A to $25 million with Japan's SBI Group coming in. The announcement went out on Friday morning Singapore time. Genedant Capital and the existing backer Kwee Liong Tek held their positions in the extension. SBI invested through SBI Ventures Asset Pte Ltd and the SBI-NTU-Kyobo Digital Innovation Fund, and said nothing about how much of the total it supplied. dtcpay disclosed no valuation, no revenue and no transaction volume.

Who led it depends on who is telling it

The company's own release says Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India led the initial tranche in April and that SBI anchored the extension. Four outlets follow that reading. CoinDesk, writing at 07:37 UTC on Friday, names SBI Group as the round's lead investor, and one trade title headlined the money as led by SBI. Those accounts and the company's release do not reconcile, and the release is the one written by the party that took the money. The month of the first tranche splits as well: the release and fintech.global say April, Cryptonomist says March, and neither corrects the other. A pre-Series A of $16.5 million in June 2023 appears in one account alone and is reported here as such.

What the licences cover

dtcpay holds a Major Payment Institution licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the top tier of the city's payments regime, and an Electronic Money Institution licence in Luxembourg, the usual door into the European market. The release adds authorisations in Hong Kong, Australia, the United States and Canada. CoinDesk describes the same footprint more loosely as Europe, Hong Kong, Australia and North America and names no Luxembourg licence, which is a difference of detail and not a conflict. Licences are much of what this kind of business sells. A merchant taking stablecoins through a supervised payment institution is buying the supervision along with the settlement, and Circle paid for the same thing when it agreed to buy Singapore's Tazapay this year.

Two named merchants and no volumes

What the company will quantify is thin. It names Metro, which the release calls the first Singapore department store to accept stablecoin payments, and Capella Singapore in hospitality. Its Visa Infinite card spends currency and stablecoin balances at more than 150 million merchant locations, a figure that describes Visa's network and not dtcpay's. No merchant count, no processing volume and no valuation appears in the release or in any of the six accounts read for this piece. The capital is earmarked for a rebuilt business portal for enterprise clients, consumer features in the app through the rest of 2026, and more merchants. Alice Liu, the founder and chief executive, framed the raise as ambition rather than maintenance.

"We raised it to fundamentally change how money moves across borders," Liu said.

What SBI is assembling in the region

Eiichiro So, chief executive of SBI Ven Capital, called the investment "the beginning of a strategic partnership with dtcpay". CryptoSlate attaches that to SBI's aim of building digital-asset origination between Japan and Southeast Asia, a framing from the outlet and not language in the release. No timeline for a dtcpay launch in Japan was announced. SBI's recent deals read more plainly than its statements do. It led a $68 million round that valued Fasset at $1 billion, and it bought about 20% of Indonesia's Ajaib to carry its yen stablecoin into that market. A licensed acceptance layer in Singapore fits beside both. What Friday's accounts do not establish is whether the two firms have agreed to build anything together, and the release names no joint product. The enterprise portal is due before the year ends, and it is the first piece of this anyone outside the company will be able to look at.