$270 million. Roughly 20%. That is what SBI Holdings is paying to get inside Indonesian multi-asset brokerage Ajaib Group. The move plants Tokyo’s largest crypto-focused financial group directly in one of Southeast Asia’s fastest-growing retail investing markets.
Ajaib confirmed the figure in a Friday LinkedIn post. Called it Indonesia’s largest tech funding round since 2022. SBI’s own announcement stayed quiet on the dollar amount. It said the group would hold roughly 20% and make Jakarta-based Ajaib an equity-method affiliate. Total funding for Ajaib since 2019 now clears $500 million.
The yen stablecoin angle is the piece to watch. Nikkei Asia reported SBI aims to use the partnership to push circulation of the yen-pegged JPYSC across Southeast Asia. Ajaib already runs stablecoin OTC rails. That gives SBI an on-ramp straight into Indonesian institutional flows. Crypto Briefing, citing the Nikkei report, pegged Ajaib’s implied valuation at roughly $1.35 billion. The math: $270 million for 20%. Neither company confirmed the figure.
Why a brokerage? Ajaib offers domestic and international equities, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, crypto, stablecoins, commodities and FX. Plus OTC stablecoin settlement and liquidity for institutional clients in Indonesia. For SBI, that distribution surface is the point. The Japanese group already runs the JPYSC yen stablecoin, the B2C2 crypto market maker in London, and exchanges SBI VC Trade in Tokyo and Coinhako in Singapore. It is also building Strium, a Layer-1 blockchain designed for financial applications. And assembling what it calls the “SBI APAC Digital Economic Zone,” a network of digital-asset exchanges across Southeast Asia.
Yoshitaka Kitao, SBI’s chairman and president, said in a statement: “In this era of tokenization, the importance of global infrastructure for digital assets is greater than ever.” Kitao framed Ajaib’s mix of traditional financial products and digital assets as a fit for SBI’s regional strategy.
What the announcements leave out is the hard part. No deal close date. No regulatory approval conditions. No word on whether the $270 million is entirely primary capital or includes secondary share purchases. The mechanics of how JPYSC, a yen stablecoin issued under Japan’s payment-services regime, would clear through Indonesian markets go unaddressed. Indonesia’s financial regulator, OJK, has moved cautiously on digital assets. It routes crypto oversight to the Commodity Futures Trading Regulatory Agency rather than treating tokens as securities.
SBI has spent the last two years stacking digital-asset infrastructure across Asia. Minority stake by minority stake. Ajaib is the largest single bet in that pattern so far. Whether the stablecoin circulation actually expands or the stake proves mostly a distribution play, the positioning is concrete. Japanese institutional capital is buying into Southeast Asian digital-asset rails. SBI is paying $270 million to be inside the building.
