SBI Holdings announced plans to invest $270 million in Ajaib Group, an Indonesian retail investment platform, in a deal expected to close as early as August 2026 and which had not yet closed at the time of publication.

The transaction gives SBI an equity-method affiliate stake of approximately 20%, implying a post-money valuation of around $1.35 billion for Ajaib. That figure represents a 35% increase from the $1 billion valuation Ajaib carried after its 2021 Series B round, and pushes the company's total funding past $500 million since it launched operations in 2019. According to Bloomberg, the deal is the largest tech funding round in Indonesia since 2022.

Who Is Ajaib

Ajaib was founded in 2018 by Anderson Sumarli, Yada Piyajomkwan, and Kevin Aluwi, three Stanford Graduate School of Business graduates. Before co-founding the company, Sumarli worked in data science at IBM, while Piyajomkwan was a consultant at McKinsey. Sumarli has described the company's founding thesis plainly: "The future of financial services in Indonesia is mobile-first."

The platform launched as Indonesia's first fully online stock brokerage at a time when fewer than 1% of Indonesians held equities. It reached unicorn status in 2021, becoming the first fintech investment platform in Southeast Asia to hit a $1 billion valuation, and now counts more than 3 million registered investors. Its product range has expanded well beyond stocks and mutual funds to include crypto assets, forex margin trading, and an over-the-counter settlement desk that serves corporate and institutional clients using stablecoins (digital tokens pegged to fiat currencies on a one-to-one basis). Ajaib is also a founding shareholder in ICEx Group, a consortium of eleven of Indonesia's largest crypto exchanges that raised $70 million to build regulated market infrastructure across the archipelago. Previous backers include Y Combinator, DST Global, SoftBank Ventures Asia, Horizons Ventures, and Insignia Ventures Partners, among others.

Fitting a Larger Pattern

The Ajaib deal is not a standalone bet. SBI has been assembling a regional digital asset network at a pace that has few parallels among traditional financial institutions in Asia, under a formally articulated initiative the company calls the SBI APAC Digital Economic Zone. In July 2026, the company completed the acquisition of a majority stake in Coinhako, a Singapore-licensed crypto exchange, for roughly $100 million after receiving approval from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. That followed an existing stake in DigiFT, a Singapore platform for tokenized securities. SBI also operates SBI VC Trade, a licensed crypto exchange in Japan, and in May 2026 filed a letter of intent to acquire a stake in Bitbank, another Japanese crypto exchange, with the aim of making it a consolidated subsidiary. On the institutional side, SBI owns B2C2, a UK-based market maker active in crypto liquidity.

Taken together, these assets form a four-node architecture: Japanese retail and institutional coverage through SBI VC Trade and Bitbank; Singapore institutional infrastructure through Coinhako and DigiFT; Indonesian retail and OTC access through Ajaib; and global institutional market-making through B2C2. The Ajaib investment fills the Indonesian node in a network SBI has been constructing piece by piece across the region, which is why a deal with a retail stock broker carries strategic weight that extends well beyond equities.

CoinDesk reported in July 2026 that SBI executives have described the company's ambition as building an end-to-end digital asset value chain covering issuance, settlement, trading, asset management, and retail distribution across the region rather than only in Japan.

The Stablecoin Angle

One detail in the Ajaib deal draws particular attention: SBI's proprietary yen-denominated stablecoin, JPYSC. Japan's first trust bank-backed yen stablecoin, JPYSC was developed with Startale and issued through SBI Shinsei Trust Bank with a strict one-to-one peg. It is classified as an electronic payment instrument under Japan's Payment Services Act.

It currently circulates through SBI VC Trade. Ajaib's institutional OTC desk is a plausible distribution channel for JPYSC in Indonesia, which would extend the stablecoin's reach to one of Southeast Asia's largest economies by population (280 million people).

There is a significant regulatory caveat. Indonesia's financial regulator, the OJK (Otoritas Jasa Keuangan), which took over oversight of crypto assets from Bappebti in January 2025, does not yet have a dedicated stablecoin framework. Stablecoins are currently treated the same as other crypto assets, with no reserve or backing requirements. OJK's 2026 to 2031 innovation roadmap does include stablecoins and tokenized assets as policy priorities, meaning the framework could be built in parallel with commercial activity rather than ahead of it. That creates low regulatory friction in the near term but also a gap in consumer protection. A compliance deadline for digital asset platforms under OJK Regulation 27/2024 and OJK Regulation No. 23 of 2025 passed in July 2026. As a licensed operator, Ajaib would be expected to have met those requirements; Verse Press was unable to independently confirm its current compliance status ahead of publication.

Yoshitaka Kitao, SBI Holdings chairman, described the Coinhako acquisition in July 2026 as "another step toward creating global infrastructure for tokenized finance," a framing consistent with SBI's broader stated strategy across its regional push into Southeast Asia.

What Comes Next

For retail investors, institutional participants, regional competitors, and fintech operators across the region, the combination of Ajaib's OTC stablecoin desk, its ICEx Group membership, and SBI's JPYSC rail represents a potential new settlement corridor. For developers and builders specifically, whether that corridor opens to third-party integration will depend largely on how quickly OJK finalizes its stablecoin and tokenization rules under the 2026 to 2031 roadmap. On-chain metrics for JPYSC, including total value locked and transaction volume, are not yet publicly available via CoinGecko or DefiLlama, as the stablecoin has not expanded beyond SBI VC Trade's own infrastructure. Those figures will be a key signal to watch as SBI's cross-border network matures.