The Omise ICO has become a gold-standard for how the fund raising strategy is meant to work

Omise, a Bangkok-based payments gateway, announced today it has raised an undisclosed investment lead by the corporate venture arm Krungsri Finnovate.

Krungsri Finnovate is a subsidiary of Krungsri (Bank of Ayudhya) and a member of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, a Japanese financial holdings company.

This marks its second investment of the year for Krungri Finnovate after a US$3.2 million round into FINNOMENA announced a couple of weeks ago.

As part of the deal, Krungsri plans to adopt the payment technology to support its own online payment services.

“As we set out the ground works and continue to build the platform which will facilitate the future of open payments and value exchange (OmiseGO network), we’re excited to leverage synergy of our partners and this new capital to continue to build our platform as well as scale our operations into countries across the Asia Pacific region,” said Jun Hasegawa, the CEO & Founder of Omise and OmiseGO in a statement.

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The Series B round comes just months after the company raised US$25 million for its blockchain-based e-wallet via an initial coin offering. The product is called OmiseGO and the goal is to allow people to build an ecosystem in which they can transfer money and potentially buy things without ever using a bank.

However, the product does not plan to fully launch until late-2018, according to TechCrunch.

Because of Omise’s track-record and the fact that they are an established company, their token sale has been exhibited as an example of the positive (and disruptive) potential of ICOs.

Including the ICO, Omise has raised US$45.4 million in funding before today’s undisclosed round, according to Crunchbase. The alphabet soup of funding rounds is a bit muddled in this case — Omise called today’s news a Series B, but it also raised a U$17.5 million round last year which it also called a Series B.

A spokesperson from Omise defined the latest round as a strategic investment.

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The core product for Omise — which means ‘store’ in Japanese — is a payments gateway like Braintree or Stripe. It is a white label solution that allows companies to quickly set up a platform for accepting transactions.

For SMEs, building the Omise solution is free and the company takes a 3.65 per cent fee from each transaction. It also has a full-scale enterprise feature on a tiered pricing structure.

Omise operates in Japan, Singapore and Thailand and the company plans to expand to Indonesia and Malaysia in the near future.

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Updated: Thursday, September 28 at 1:30pm with comments from an Omise about the investment alphabet soup.

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