Pay2o, a Tokyo startup that collects recurring fees for gyms, schools and clubs straight from customers' bank accounts, raised ¥170m (about $1.07m) in a seed round announced on 5 November 2026.
XTech Ventures led the round, with Mizuho Capital and the software company PLAID taking part through an allotment of new shares. Pay2o did not disclose a valuation. The company had been operating in stealth before the announcement, The Bridge reported.
Pay2o said it will spend the money on hiring sales and customer-success staff and on building out the product and its external API.
What Pay2o does
Businesses that bill members every month, such as fitness clubs, cram schools and music or sports lessons, typically pay credit card fees of around 3% to 4% of sales, according to the company. Direct debit avoids those fees but involves paper forms and a wait before collection can start.
Pay2o lets customers pay from their bank account using only a smartphone, without entering a card number. Payers log in with a passkey, and bank verification happens on the bank's own page, so Pay2o never sees their banking password. Once a customer has signed up, monthly charges run automatically. Merchants can also take one-off payments, such as entry or trial fees, straight away, and The Bridge reported that failed payments are retried automatically for up to 30 days.
Fees start at 0.95% excluding tax for merchants that meet conditions on their bank and payment volume; other rates are quoted case by case. The company points to card fraud as another reason to move away from cards: it cited Japan Credit Association figures putting 2025 card fraud losses at about ¥51bn (about $322m), roughly 93% of it involving stolen card numbers.
Customers and plans
The service launched in February 2026 and is being used by fitness clubs and lesson schools across Japan, the company said. One customer, the youth athletics club Nishinomiya AC, which has more than 500 members, said its billing and payment matching are now automated and its fees are less than half what it paid for cards.
Pay2o now wants to sell to larger operators with many locations, and has opened an external API so that companies selling membership, booking and customer-management software can build its payments into their products. It did not name any software partners.
Who invested
Founder and chief executive Ryosuke Sekine previously worked at Mitsui Sumitomo Card and Mizuho Bank, and launched business finance services at freee and PayPay. He set up Pay2o in October 2024 after going through XTech Ventures' X-Gate accelerator programme.
Kohei Ogino of XTech Ventures said he met Sekine two years before the round, while the idea was still taking shape, and that the company went through several pivots before reaching its current product. Tomohiro Tsunoda of Mizuho Capital said large players dominate payments in Japan but that he backed Sekine's experience, and that Mizuho would use its group network to help. Kei Furukawa of PLAID said Pay2o gives subscription businesses a new option built on bank-account payments.
The release did not give Pay2o's headcount, revenue or the number of merchants using the service.
Company website: pay2o.jp