JPYC's Series B closes at 6bn yen, most of it raised already

What happened

JPYC Inc said on 5 August that it had completed additional fundraising in an extension of its Series B round, taking the round to approximately 6bn yen cumulatively, and named AZ-COM Maruwa Holdings, a Tokyo-listed logistics group, as the investor. The release says the proceeds will go to expanding the company's ecosystem across finance and web3 and to accelerating adoption of the coin. It gives no figure for the extension itself, no valuation, no stake and no quotation. JPYC took a funds transfer operator registration in August 2025 and says it was the first domestic funds transfer operator to issue a yen stablecoin; JPYC is exchangeable one for one with the yen, is backed by yen deposits and Japanese government bonds, and runs on Avalanche, Ethereum, Polygon and Kaia. The company was established in November 2019 and has capital of 2.014bn yen.

Why it matters

The interesting part is who is buying and what for. JPYC and AZ-COM Maruwa agreed a capital and business alliance on 22 July, and JPYC's release that day describes a settlement platform built on the coin to pay the group's subcontracted drivers, employees and suppliers, with a wallet application, a loyalty scheme and payments executed automatically by smart contract. The same release puts the AZ-COM network at 2,968 member companies at the end of June 2026. That is a stablecoin taking growth capital from a shipper that wants to pay its own contractors faster, rather than from an exchange or a fund looking for float, and it points the coin at business-to-business payments in a country whose retail rails are already good and whose corporate ones settle on bank hours. It also sets the equity against the coin: CoinDesk puts JPYC's market value at $55.5m, so a Series B of about 6bn yen is roughly two-thirds of the outstanding supply raised as equity, which is a company being funded for a payment network it does not yet carry.

What is not settled

The size of the round is reported two ways and the primary settles it. CoinDesk's headline says JPYC raised $38m in a Series B led by AZ-COM Maruwa and The Block's says it raised $38m in an extended Series B; the company's release calls approximately 6bn yen the cumulative Series B total rather than the extension. JPYC's own release of 22 May put that cumulative figure at approximately 5bn yen, so the new money here is about 1bn, which is the amount The Block attributes to AZ-COM Maruwa. Neither the extension amount nor any equity stake appears in a JPYC release, and the Nikkei report that puts the stake at 2.9 per cent could not be read here. The count of counterparties differs too: the reports put the payment target at about 2,300 subcontractors and drivers, while the July release counts 2,968 member companies, and the two are not obviously the same set. No JPYC release read here gives a current figure for coins outstanding, and the payment platform has no announced start date.