SmartBank, which offers a prepaid card and finance app in Japan, has raised a $20M Series A, bringing its total funding to $30M
Shota Horii, his twin brother Yuta Horii and Jun Taketani co-founded SmartBank in 2019 after selling their previous startup Fablic, a Japanese online secondhand marketplace, to Rakuten in 2016.
Context & Ripple Effects
SmartBank is a repeat-founders bet: Shota Horii, Yuta Horii and Jun Taketani built and sold the secondhand marketplace Fablic — actually sold to Rakuten in 2016 per the company's own history — before launching the prepaid card and finance app in 2019. The $20M Series A takes them to $30M total raised.
The round lands in a Japanese consumer fintech market that has been heating up fast: Paidy raised an $83M Series C extension proving demand for paying online without a credit card, and just months ago Kyash closed a $41M Series D that reportedly marked Block's first investment in Asia.
First-order effects
- SmartBank gains roughly two years of additional runway to scale its prepaid card and app against better-capitalized domestic rivals like Kyash, which has now raised well past $100M across its Series C and D.
Second-order effects
- Kyash and Paidy now face a funded challenger attacking the same no-credit-card consumer base from the prepaid side, pressuring all three to differentiate on features rather than price alone; Block's Asia entry via Kyash also signals that foreign strategic capital may chase similar Japanese assets next.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Japan's consumer fintech layer consolidates into a few heavily-funded app-based banking platforms competing to serve users who never adopt traditional credit cards — with international investors increasingly setting the pace of the market.
The trend: Japanese consumer fintech is drawing progressively larger rounds as cardless payment and mobile-banking apps scale, pulling in foreign strategic capital alongside domestic backers.