First Catapult: Inclusion SE Asia participant to receive investment through NextFin Asia

LUXEMBOURG, Oct. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (LHoFT) today announced that Finfra, an Indonesia-based lending-as-a-service platform and participant in its Catapult: Inclusion SE Asia program, is the first company to receive investment through NextFin Asia.

Finfra raised new capital in a Series A extension funding round from ADB Ventures, the venture capital arm of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), through the NextFin Asia fund, alongside existing investors Cento Ventures and Accion Ventures. The funding will support Finfra’s growth, strengthen its technology platform, and support its expansion into new markets.

Launched in February 2026, NextFin Asia is the dedicated investment fund supporting LHoFT’s Catapult: Inclusion SE Asia acceleration program. It is a partnership between LHoFT, ADB Ventures, and the Luxembourg Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, Defence, Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade (MFA).

“When we launched NextFin Asia, we called it a world first: a development bank joining forces with a fintech accelerator to invest in fintechs driving financial inclusion and social impact. A unique and bold model, made possible by the confidence the Luxembourg Government and ADB showed in Catapult SE Asia. With this first investment, that ambition is now becoming reality,” said Alex Panican, Acting CEO of the LHoFT.

The fund invests in early-stage tech companies helping to advance financial inclusion across Southeast Asia. By combining the program’s acceleration and ecosystem support with access to investment opportunities through ADB Ventures, NextFin Asia helps promising companies access the capital and support they need to grow. Finfra participated in Catapult: Inclusion SE Asia in 2024.

“Finfra’s progression from Catapult participant to the first company to receive investment through NextFin Asia highlights the high value of combining acceleration support with access to capital. It is a very encouraging early example of how the initiative can help promising fintech companies expand their reach and impact across the region,” added Annabelle Fonteneau, Head of Acceleration Programs at the LHoFT.

Finfra provides the infrastructure and operational capabilities lenders need to launch and scale lending products more efficiently. Through a single platform, lenders can originate, underwrite, service, and collect loans without having to build local operations from the ground up, helping financial institutions reach more borrowers, including the underserved.

The platform also enables embedded finance models, allowing businesses and digital platforms to integrate credit into existing customer journeys and opening new pathways for small businesses to access working capital.

“Access to credit remains one of the biggest challenges facing small businesses across Southeast Asia,” said Markus Prommik, Founder and CEO of Finfra. “Our mission is to make lending infrastructure more accessible so that financial institutions can serve more businesses and individuals that have traditionally been overlooked. We’re grateful for the support of our investors and excited to continue building the infrastructure that helps expand access to capital for millions of small businesses in the region.”

“Many small businesses still struggle to access the financing they need to grow, while lenders face significant costs and complexity in reaching them,” said Yichu Zhang, Investment Specialist, ADB Ventures. “Finfra is helping close that gap by making it easier for lenders to launch and scale lending products.

Through NextFin Asia, we’re pleased to support a solution that can help more small businesses access financing through formal channels.”

In addition to investment, Finfra will continue to benefit from the wider NextFin Asia ecosystem, including connections with financial institutions, industry experts, and partners working to advance financial inclusion across the region.

Catapult: Inclusion SE Asia is gearing up for its next cohort of promising fintech startups. Applications already open. Visit Catapult: Inclusion SE ASia #4 webpage to learn more and to apply!

Follow us on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/the-lhoft

About the LHoFT Foundation
The LHoFT Foundation is a public-private sector initiative that drives technology innovation for Luxembourg’s financial services industry, connecting the domestic and international fintech community to develop solutions that shape the world of tomorrow. The LHoFT Foundation offers an innovation platform that provides fintech startups with access to talent, expertise, funding, and market opportunities. The LHoFT Foundation also works with government agencies, regulators, and industry associations to foster a supportive and inclusive fintech ecosystem in Luxembourg.

For more information, please visit: https://lhoft.com/

About Finfra
Established in 2022, Finfra serves as a prominent Indonesian lending-as-a-service platform, allowing enterprises to embed customizable credit offerings directly into their customer journeys. Its API-driven infrastructure delivers end-to-end loan management, automated underwriting, risk analytics, and institutional capital access, helping digital platforms generate additional revenues while deepening customer connection. Supported by prominent venture funds including Cento Ventures, Accion Ventures, and ZVC, Finfra actively promotes financial inclusion throughout Southeast Asia. Through close cooperation between its affiliate and the Indonesian Financial Services Authority (OJK), the company upholds rigorous regulatory standards, expanding financing opportunities across the country.

For additional information, please visit: https://finfra.io/

About ADB Ventures
ADB Ventures is the venture arm of the Asian Development Bank, supporting technology-driven startups that deliver measurable social, climate, and development impact across Asia and the Pacific. It provides

early-stage capital, strategic support, and access to ADB’s network, helping startups scale innovative solutions in sectors such as inclusive fintech, climate tech, sustainable agriculture, and clean energy. By crowding-in private capital for sustainable development, ADB Ventures accelerates progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals in emerging markets.

For more information, please visit: https://ventures.adb.org/

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SOURCE THE LHOFT – LUXEMBOURG HOUSE OF FINANCIAL TECHNOLOGY

Led by Blockchain Capital, the funding will accelerate the expansion of PhotonPay’s stablecoin-centric Financial OS, connecting stablecoin liquidity with global fiat networks to unlock digital assets for everyday corporate operations and cross-border settlement.

HONG KONG, Oct. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — PhotonPay today announced the closing of a $40 million Series C funding round led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from new investor SBI Group and follow-on investments from existing investors IDG Capital, GL Ventures, and Lightspeed Faction. Blacksheep Technology acted as exclusive financial advisor to PhotonPay on the transaction.

The new capital will support the expansion of PhotonPay’s stablecoin-centric Financial Operating System (Financial OS), with investment focused on enhancing multi-asset wallet capabilities, expanding global card issuing, strengthening local clearing infrastructure in key markets, and developing an agent-ready financial execution layer.

As of August 2026, PhotonPay’s annualized transaction volume reached US$65 billion. The company has secured 34 payment and financial licenses and regulatory authorizations across the Americas, Europe and Asia, and serves over 200,000 business customers across more than 200 countries and territories.

As stablecoins move beyond crypto-native use cases into corporate treasury, settlement and commercial spending, PhotonPay sees the next phase of global finance not as a choice between stablecoins and fiat currencies, but as the convergence of both. Its Financial OS connects on-chain liquidity with the banking, clearing and card networks businesses rely on for everyday operations.

“Moving money across borders in seconds means little if it still takes days to put that capital to work,” said Lewison Chen, Founder and CEO of PhotonPay. “Stablecoins are accelerating global money movement, while local clearing and global card issuing connect that liquidity to local settlement and everyday business spending. Our Financial OS brings these capabilities together, making the underlying infrastructure far less visible to businesses, even as it becomes more essential than ever.”

“At the same time, business software is becoming increasingly autonomous,” Chen added. “AI is shifting financial workflows from people manually operating fragmented tools toward systems that understand business intent and coordinate execution across assets, accounts and financial rails. That creates the foundation for agentic commerce. Stablecoins change how money moves. AI changes how it gets put to work. But commerce is still what money is for.”

Moving Money Across Assets and Markets

PhotonPay’s Financial OS brings together multi-asset wallets, global money movement, foreign exchange, local clearing, and global card issuing through an integrated API-first architecture. This unified system gives businesses access to the financial capabilities they need to manage and deploy funds across markets.

Stablecoins sit at the core of this architecture. PhotonPay’s multi-asset wallet connects stablecoin liquidity with fiat balances, integrating asset conversion, foreign exchange, and local clearing into a single connected workflow. This enables businesses to move funds across supported on-chain and traditional financial networks, turning digital asset liquidity into purchasing power for local payments and everyday corporate spending.

Supporting this dual-rail infrastructure is PhotonPay’s established global financial network. Businesses can open local collection accounts in 17 key markets and receive funds in more than 60 currencies. On the payout side, the network supports over 100 payment routes across local clearing systems, bank transfers, and digital wallets, including payouts to 74 major local e-wallets. Approximately 97% of payout transactions reach recipients within hours or on the same day, with 68% arriving in real time.

Global card issuing extends these capabilities into programmable business spending. Through PhotonPay’s APIs, businesses and platforms can issue virtual and physical cards, configure granular spending controls, and embed card payments directly into their software and automated workflows. Over the past 12 months, PhotonPay issued 4.4 million cards, up 275% YoY.

Beyond its first-party payment solutions, PhotonPay makes its infrastructure available through embedded finance, enabling technology platforms to natively integrate global accounts, payments, and card issuing into their own products. The company now serves more than 100 enterprise and platform partners, extending the reach of its Financial OS into industry-specific workflows.

From Financial Intent to Agentic Commerce

As AI agents assume active operational roles, financial infrastructure must evolve beyond API access to enable programmable, policy-governed execution. It requires systems capable of translating high-level instructions into coordinated financial actions, with deterministic controls governing how those actions are executed.

In May 2026, PhotonPay and Mastercard completed a live agentic payment demonstration using a tokenized PhotonPay card, validating AI-initiated transactions across existing global card networks.

Building on this milestone, PhotonPay is developing standardized financial interfaces designed for developers and AI agents. With planned support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), PhotonPay aims to make account information, balances, card functions, and payments accessible as composable financial primitives, allowing AI agents to securely retrieve context and initiate financial workflows within defined authorization boundaries.

To govern this agent-ready layer, PhotonPay is developing a policy-based execution framework designed to enforce programmable authorization rules, spending limits, and transaction-level controls. The framework is intended to enable AI agents to coordinate financial tasks across supported accounts and assets, while ensuring that execution remains subject to explicit, enforceable policies set by businesses.

PhotonPay is also advancing its AI-assisted risk review capabilities, designed to identify complex cases for human assessment. Together, these initiatives reflect a foundational principle of autonomous finance: AI may interpret intent and coordinate tasks, but financial execution must remain governed by verifiable authorization, deterministic controls, and auditable records.

“Connecting financial networks is only the beginning. The real breakthrough is abstracting that complexity behind a unified, programmable financial layer, so businesses and AI agents can move from intent to execution within clearly defined boundaries,” said Chen.

Simple on the Surface, Deep by Design

The promise of a Financial OS is simplicity: enabling businesses to manage assets, route money, and execute payments through a unified financial operating layer. Yet delivering that simplicity requires deep financial infrastructure beneath the surface.

While stablecoins accelerate borderless value transfer, turning that liquidity into local settlement, supplier payments, and corporate spending still depends on established banking relationships, domestic clearing rails, foreign exchange infrastructure, and global card networks. Each market brings its own regulatory and operational requirements.

For PhotonPay, building a Financial OS means abstracting these fragmented global networks into a programmable, interconnected financial system. The objective is not to eliminate financial complexity, but to manage it within the underlying infrastructure, so businesses can operate without having to navigate these systems themselves.

“AI can simplify how businesses interact with financial services, but it cannot replace the infrastructure required to deliver them,” said JP Pi, Chief Compliance Officer at PhotonPay. “Establishing local financial capabilities takes years of investment, institutional partnerships, and regulatory engagement. Software or AI models alone cannot replicate that depth. The simplicity businesses experience is the result of that heavy lifting, not a substitute for it.”

PhotonPay has engineered a financial foundation spanning both stablecoin and fiat rails, connecting multi-asset conversion with local clearing networks. Institutional partnerships with J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered, and DBS, alongside connections to domestic payment systems such as Brazil’s Pix and Mexico’s SPEI, form the backbone of this network.

The new capital will enable PhotonPay to strengthen its local clearing and compliance infrastructure in existing markets while expanding into new jurisdictions, scaling the reach of its Financial OS across corporate spending, embedded finance, and agentic commerce.

“Businesses want one provider that can handle their payments across currencies and markets, whether they’re using bank transfers, stablecoins or cards. Lewison and his team have spent a decade building the banking relationships, licenses and local payment infrastructure to deliver that. We believe PhotonPay’s ability to bring these capabilities together gives it a strong advantage as businesses adopt stablecoins for everyday payments.” – BCAP，Yuanhan Li，Partner

“As stablecoins become increasingly integrated into global payment systems, bridging digital assets with traditional financial infrastructure will be essential to unlocking their real-world potential. PhotonPay’s established global payment network and its vision for a stablecoin-centric Financial OS align closely with SBI Group’s strategy to advance digital financial infrastructure and expand the practical adoption of digital assets. We look forward to supporting PhotonPay’s continued growth and exploring opportunities for strategic collaboration across the SBI Group ecosystem.” – Eiichiro So, CEO & Managing Director of SBI Ven Capital

About PhotonPay

Founded in Hong Kong in 2015, PhotonPay is a global fintech company building a next-generation, stablecoin-centric Financial Operating System (Financial OS). Its API-first architecture brings together multi-asset wallets supporting stablecoins and fiat currencies, global money movement, foreign exchange, global card issuing, embedded finance, and local clearing infrastructure, connecting digital and traditional financial rails within an integrated financial system.

PhotonPay operates 16 offices worldwide, employs nearly 600 people, and holds 34 payment and financial licenses and regulatory authorizations across the Americas, Europe and Asia. The company serves businesses across more than 200 countries and territories.

For more information, visit www.photonpay.com.

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SOURCE PhotonPay

As South Korea’s exclusive Lexile Express Test distributor, LEDDI will provide research-based tools to assess English reading ability, match students with appropriate texts, and monitor growth.

DURHAM, N.C. and SEOUL, South Korea, Oct. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — MetaMetrics®, creator of the Lexile® Framework for Reading, and LEDDI Corporation, a Seoul-based educational technology company, announce an expanded partnership that establishes LEDDI as the exclusive authorized distributor of the Lexile Framework for Reading computer-adaptive and fixed-form Express Tests in South Korea.

The expanded partnership builds on the companies’ existing collaboration to bring research-based reading measurement to English language learners across South Korea. Through the agreement, LEDDI will offer both components of the Lexile Framework: student reading measures and text complexity measures. Together, these capabilities enable educators to match students with reading materials in their optimal reading range, personalize instruction, and monitor reading growth over time.

As a distributor, LEDDI will offer a computer-adaptive version of the Lexile Express Test to efficiently assess students’ English reading ability and provide Lexile measures. LEDDI will also offer Lexile text measurement capabilities, allowing educators and content providers to determine the reading demands of instructional materials using the same developmental scale.

“Reliable, research-backed reading measurement is essential to helping English language learners build the skills they need to succeed,” said Chris Minnich, CEO of MetaMetrics. “By bringing both sides of the Lexile scale together, LEDDI can help their partners support reading growth.”

LEDDI’s comprehensive English literacy platform serves elementary students and educators and features more than 4,500 English-language books, AI-powered worksheets, reading assessments, and classroom management tools that streamline instruction and track student progress.

“Accurate assessment of Korean students’ reading abilities unlocks truly personalized learning, driving tangible progress in their English proficiency. Through LEDDI, educators can now provide students and parents with an easy-to-follow learning path for each student’s language development,” said Kim Seung Kyu, CEO of LEDDI Corporation.

The Lexile Framework is an internationally recognized standard for reading measurement, with more than 40 million students receiving Lexile measures annually and more than 100 million pieces of content measured. The expanded partnership strengthens access to this global measurement infrastructure for English language learning in South Korea.

About MetaMetrics

MetaMetrics is the developer of the Lexile® Framework for Reading and the Quantile® Framework for Mathematics, the global standard for measuring student reading and math ability. For more than 40 years, MetaMetrics has partnered with educators, assessment providers, and governments to deliver scientifically rigorous measures that improve instruction and support meaningful growth. Lexile and Quantile measures are used in all 50 states and in more than 100 countries worldwide, helping nearly 40 million students annually understand and advance their academic achievement. Learn more at www.metametrics.com.

About LEDDI

LEDDI Corporation is dedicated to providing educators with innovative and easy-to-use tools for teaching English, with a focus on enhancing the educational experience. Through its flagship program, LEDDI, the company offers a personalized learning experience paired with rich, engaging content tailored to each student’s needs. To learn more about how LEDDI Corporation is redefining education, visit https://leddi.ai/.

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SOURCE MetaMetrics