Sony Ventures has poured an additional $13 million into Startale Group via the Sony Innovation Fund, doubling down on a partnership that aims to bring entertainment industry infrastructure on-chain.
Startale’s CEO Sota Watanabe said the latest follow-on investment, announced Jan. 29, strengthens the company’s capacity to “deliver the infrastructure required” to scale Soneium globally. The capital boost follows a $3.5 million seed round in 2023 that included Sony Network Communications as a strategic backer, and a $3.5 million seed extension in 2024 from UOB Venture Management and Samsung Next. With this round, Startale’s disclosed funding totals $20 million.
Startale began as a spin-off from the Astar Foundation and serves as the principal architect and technical infrastructure provider for Soneium — an Ethereum Layer-2 network co-developed with Sony Block Solutions Labs. Built on Optimism’s OP Stack, Soneium is tailored to unlock on-chain opportunities for the entertainment sector.
Since launching its mainnet in January last year, Soneium has processed more than 500 million transactions and now supports over 250 live dApps, the company said. The network has rapidly integrated notable DeFi and Web3 projects: Uniswap added Soneium support in May, Aave was integrated in June, and infrastructure partner Plume is using Soneium to stream tokenized yields through its SkyLink interoperability engine. LINE is also listed among the project’s collaborators.
Startale has also been building user-facing tooling: Startale Labs announced the Startale App as a “super-app” gateway to Soneium; it is currently in beta without a firm release date.
Kazuhito Hadano, CEO of Sony Ventures Corporation, commented that Sony looks forward to continuing support for Startale’s ambitions — a signal that Sony is positioning itself as a core infrastructure player in Web3. The wider Sony group has recently been active in crypto-related moves: Sony Bank said last month it plans to issue a U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin for U.S. customers as soon as fiscal 2026 in partnership with Bastion Platforms, and Sony Singapore has begun accepting USDC payments through a tie-up with Crypto.com.
Taken together, the investment underscores Sony’s strategy of backing both infrastructure and consumer-facing crypto services as it pursues broader Web3 integration in entertainment and financial services.
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