Cross-border payments startup Tokenz, founded by Taiwan native Lin Bo-Huan, announced on June 2 that it has completed a Series A fundraising round, raising a total of 1 billion yen. Japan’s “Smartphone New Law” (“スマホ新法,” Act on Promotion of Competition in Smart Phone) will take effect in December 2025, mandating Apple and Google to open up third-party payments and enable out-of-app checkout, driving a sharp surge in demand for cross-border payments. Tokenz’s MoR (merchant of record) platform sits at the core of this raceway.
Use of Series A Funds
Three clear directions:
Product development: Expand payment types to about 300; enhance AI-assisted anti-fraud detection and tax-optimization features
Expansion of global presence: Current locations are Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, the United States, and Lithuania
Talent recruitment: Recruit top professionals in the payments and financial technology (FinTech) fields
Service positioning of the Tokenz MoR platform
Tokenz’s MoR platform uses licensed legal-entity identities to represent companies, selling digital products to end consumers in the capacity of a reseller. Its service scope includes: multi-country payment integrations, foreign-currency settlement, payment-flow refunds, fraud prevention, risk control, compliant currency exchange, and tax reporting.
Its target customers are digital content providers such as game companies, video streaming, manga, and application developers. Lin Bo-Huan said: “The market has already given us a clear answer—regional expertise is the key. We will focus more resources on deeper product development, compliant expansion, and serving our existing merchant partners.”
Common questions
What is the core value of the MoR (merchant of record) model for digital content operators?
As a licensed legal entity, the MoR platform takes over cross-border compliance processes such as multi-country payment integrations, foreign-currency settlement, refunds, fraud detection, and tax reporting. Operators only need to handle the sales of digital products, while the complex cross-border compliance work is handled entirely by the MoR platform. For small and medium-sized developers, building this compliance-infrastructure in-house is extremely costly, and the MoR model directly solves this pain point.
What direct impact does Japan’s new law have on Tokenz’s business?
Japan’s “Smartphone New Law,” taking effect in December 2025, forces Apple and Google to open up third-party payments and app external checkout. This gives operators their first chance to collect payments directly from consumers while also requiring them to take on, themselves, the tax and compliance responsibilities that were previously handled on their behalf by the platforms. Tokenz’s MoR service is well positioned to address this newly emerging compliance need.
What is Tokenz’s current customer scale and global footprint?
Tokenz has about 20 employees globally. Its business and engineering teams are mainly distributed in Japan and Taiwan. Its global locations cover Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, the United States, and Lithuania. Existing customers include “HUNTERxHUNTER NENxSURVIVOR” under Bushiroad, “Crash Fever” by WonderPlanet, and Game8. It has already been adopted by dozens of domestic and international operators.
