Asia Funding Weekly: Stablecoins and AI Infrastructure Lead APAC Capital Flows

Weekly Funding Signal

Stablecoin payment infrastructure and AI compute are converging as the dominant capital magnets across Asia this week, with institutional-grade rails and hardware attracting the largest checks.

Key Deals

Builder to Watch

• PhotonPay: PhotonPay is building what it calls a next-generation Financial Operating System centered on stablecoins — spanning multi-asset wallets, global card issuance, and local clearing across fiat and digital assets. The $40 million Series C led by Blockchain Capital, with new participation from Japan's SBI Group, deepens its reach into Asia's fastest-growing stablecoin corridors. Existing backers IDG Capital and GL Ventures add a China-linked capital layer that positions PhotonPay at the intersection of Silicon Valley crypto capital and Asian payment infrastructure. Its ambition to build a financial execution layer callable by AI agents places it ahead of most stablecoin infrastructure plays in the region.

• FuriosaAI: The Korean AI chip startup pulled in $620 million at a $2.9 billion valuation, roughly four times its previous mark, with the Korea National Growth Fund contributing $280 million alone. Investors span Korea, the US, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi — a rare cross-regional alignment behind a single Asian silicon play. With TSMC slated to produce 20,000 RNGD inference chips this year and over 40,000 by 2027, FuriosaAI is scaling from design to volume manufacturing at a pace that could make it Korea's most consequential AI hardware company since the memory-chip era.

Also Noted

• Mochatrade: India-based YC alum building US-stock perpetuals with UPI rupee rails on Hyperliquid, backed by CoinFund and Coinbase Ventures. Its FIU-IND registration push signals a serious compliance-first approach to India's evolving digital asset framework.
• Birch Hill: New York RWA startup with ex-Goldman and BlackRock talent raised $4 million from Multicoin Capital — no direct Asia vehicle, but its Morpho vault curation and private credit tokenization model is one Asian allocators are watching closely.
• Predicate: On-chain compliance infrastructure with Paxos and 1kx participation; its screening of over $1 billion in transactions has relevance for Asian exchanges needing sanctions and AML tooling at scale.
• IOSG Ventures' investment in Fun: Singapore-based IOSG backed the fiat rails powering Polymarket and other on-chain venues, processing an annualized $100 billion across 150+ countries — a strategic bet on crypto's global settlement layer with clear Asia-Pacific fund leadership.

Capital Flow

• Stablecoin payments and RWA tokenization captured the most institutional attention this week, with capital flowing into infrastructure that bridges fiat, stablecoins, and real-world assets rather than consumer-facing apps.
• Investors favored projects with existing revenue, regulatory engagement, or live transaction volume — a clear shift toward derisked, compliance-aware models over speculative protocols.
• The Asia angle was strongest in Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, with cross-border corridors linking Asian capital to global stablecoin rails and AI compute supply chains.

PANews View

The signal beneath this week's numbers is straightforward: Asia is no longer merely a source of users or liquidity, but an active underwriter of the rails — payments, compute, and tokenization — that modular crypto and AI economies depend on. SBI's move into PhotonPay alongside Korea's state-backed FuriosaAI round shows sovereign and quasi-sovereign capital in the region moving from observation to direct ownership. What remains underweight is Asia-led prediction market or consumer DeFi innovation — a gap that leaves the region exposed to US platforms winning Asian users without Asian-aligned infrastructure.