This Japanese Bank’s Venture Push Deepens India Bet, but Southeast Asia Is the Bigger Play

A Singapore-incorporated venture fund, jointly set up by Tokyo-based Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and Incubate Fund, a seed-focussed venture firm, has quietly built a Southeast Asian portfolio around the machinery of finance. Its bets span payments, trade credit, lending and collections, banking-as-a-service and digital assets, with the focus trained on the underlying infrastructure that companies rely on to move money, manage liquidity and keep commerce running across the region.

The fund recently committed $12–15 million in follow-on rounds to three of its Indian portfolio companies, deepening its exposure to financial infrastructure as strategic capital continues to move into the sector.

The money went to Easy Home Finance, Vayana and DPDzero, covering different parts of India’s lending and financial services stack. The move reinforces the fund’s India strategy at a time when banks, non-banking financial companies and enterprises are looking for stronger operating rails across underwriting, supply-chain finance and loan recovery.

The latest deployments come after a steady run of deals across India and Southeast Asia, reflecting the fund’s continued confidence in companies that enable financial institutions to manage risk and serve customers more efficiently. The pattern also suggests the fund is moving beyond first bets and putting more money behind companies where it sees stronger execution and strategic fit. India is the clearest expression of that strategy so far but not the only one.

The fund’s Singapore base puts the India follow-ons in a wider regional and even global frame. Its public disclosures show investments in Olyv and Aerem Solutions in India in 2026, after backing companies such as etaily, WIZ.AI, Flipspaces and DPDzero in the previous year. Earlier bets included Vayana, Drip Capital and Paper.id, followed by MODIFI, Easy Home Finance and M2P Fintech.

SMBC Asia Rising Fund runs a $200 million corpus and has now backed more than a dozen startups across India and Southeast Asia. By late 2025, it had committed about half the fund, and it expects to be fully deployed by the second half of 2026, with around a quarter of the capital earmarked for Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Paper.id, an Indonesian B2B invoicing and payments platform, was part of the fund’s first set of investments, alongside Vayana and Drip Capital. The fund has since moved deeper into the region.

In November 2025, it led the Series B round for WIZ.AI, a Singapore-based enterprise AI company whose voice agent tools are used across Southeast Asian customer service operations. In December that year, it led a round for etaily, a Philippines-based digital commerce platform ranked by the Financial Times as the third fastest-growing company in Asia-Pacific in 2025. This round lifted the company’s total funding to more than $24 million.

Announcing the etaily investment, Katsufumi Uchida, head of SMBC‘s Asia-Pacific division, tied the deal directly to the group’s regional strategy. “As we celebrate 10 years in the Philippines, SMBC Group remains dedicated to our Asia Multi-Franchise strategy, leveraging our extensive branch network to strengthen our presence in the Philippines and across the region,” he said.

Taken together, the three deals — payments in Indonesia, enterprise AI in Singapore and digital commerce in the Philippines — read less like a set of country bets than a unified regional thesis about building the fintech value chain across Asian finance.

SMBC’s regional weight extends well beyond the fund. Under what the group calls its multi-franchise strategy, it has built or backed banking franchises, including Bank BTPN in Indonesia, RCBC in the Philippines and VPBank and FE Credit in Vietnam. That gives the fund a bigger role beyond writing cheques. For a portfolio startup, it means a backer with real banking operations and customer networks in the markets it wants to grow into — something a standard venture investor cannot offer.

For SMBC, the bet on fintech infrastructure fits its broader regional strategy. The fund says it aims to create business value through investments and collaborations with startups across Asia, rather than acting solely as a financial investor.

This connective tissue is also visible in the fund’s trade-finance bets. For instance, Vayana in India works in supply-chain credit, Drip Capital in Palo Alto focusses on cross-border export finance and MODIFI in Amsterdam provides digital trade finance for smaller businesses. Their spread across India, the US and the EU is not incidental. Trade finance is inherently cross-border, bridging the gap between a seller in one country and a buyer in another. That means a backer building this layer needs companies on both sides of those flows. Together, they give the fund a trade and finance ecosystem that reaches across markets rather than sitting in any single one.

That same logic is already visible in its India portfolio, where the follow-on rounds come as investors place greater value on the operating rails behind payments, credit, collections and business finance.

Easy Home Finance gives SMBC Asia Rising Fund exposure to affordable housing finance, particularly outside India’s largest metro centres. The company recently raised $30 million in a Series C round to accelerate that expansion, according to the fund.

Vayana adds trade finance to the portfolio. It has built a platform around supply-chain finance and trade credit, and its NBFC licence gives it room to participate more deeply across the trade finance value chain. The company says it has facilitated more than $62 billion in financing, giving it a scale that aligns with the fund’s financial infrastructure thesis.

DPDzero adds another crucial component to the credit cycle by building collections and recovery infrastructure for financial institutions. This area has become increasingly important as digital lending expands and regulators push lenders towards more transparent, compliant recovery practices. The fintech raised $7 million in a Series A round last year led by GMO Venture Partners, with participation from SMBC Asia Rising Fund, India Quotient and others.

The common thread across the three companies is a credit-cycle framework, not a front-end consumer finance story. Easy Home Finance, Vayana and DPDzero sit at different points in that cycle. But together, they show the kind of financial rails SMBC Asia Rising Fund is backing across Asia: systems that make lending, trade credit and collections more scalable, compliant and efficient.

SMBC’s India bet also runs deeper. The Japanese banking group completed the initial acquisition of a 20% stake in Yes Bank following a 2025 agreement to pay $1.58 billion. It later moved to buy an additional 4.2% from a Carlyle affiliate. The stake mirrors SMBC’s multi-franchise model across Southeast Asia, where it takes a position in a bank itself rather than backing only the startups around it.

For startups, strategic capital from an Asia fund offers more than money. It can bring regional banking relationships, corporate partnerships and potential expansion routes outside their home markets. For SMBC, the appeal lies in identifying companies that can support its financial services ambitions across Asia while delivering venture returns.