NETSTARS

Notes compiled from publicly available sources. Last updated: 2026-07-29. Every figure is linked to the source it came from and dated. Verify against primary sources before relying on them.

TL;DR

NETSTARS (株式会社ネットスターズ) is a Tokyo-based payment gateway company founded on 2009-02-12 and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Growth Market since 2023-09-26 (code 5590). Its main product, StarPay, lets a merchant contract for and operate 40+ QR code payment brands plus credit cards and e-money through a single application, settlement, and management flow; a second line, StarPay-DX, sells self-checkout, mobile ordering, reservation and mini-app products into the same merchant base.

• FY2025 (year to 2025-12) payment volume (GPV) was ¥2,122.8bn, up 33.2% year on year; revenue ¥4,788m (+22.7%) and operating profit ¥293m — the first full-year operating profit since listing (FY2025 results release, FY2025 annual securities report p.21).
• Roughly 700,000 accounts (stores, vending machines, ticket machines) domestically as of 2025-12-31, from ~15,000 directly contracted companies (annual securities report p.6, infographics — Undated; accessed 2026-07-29).
• Headcount 221 consolidated at 2025-12-31, of which 146 at the Tokyo parent and 70 at the Dalian development subsidiary. Parent-company average age 38.2, average tenure 3.8 years, average annual pay ¥6.93m (annual securities report pp.10, 23).
• Engineering is described by the company as cloud-native with container technology on AWS (and, per its own slides, Google); it reports 99.999% payment success rate and 40 ms per transaction for calendar 2025, and states R&D activity as "none" in its filing (Q1 FY2026 presentation, annual securities report p.22).

Basic

Group companies

Sources: annual securities report pp.9, 23; StarPay-Entertainment from the 2025-12-19 release (incorporated 2026-01-26, consolidated from Q1 FY2026, representative director 長福久弘). Net Stars Hong Kong was formed as a joint venture with Finext Limited, announced 2024-08-14. The Dalian subsidiary's Beijing branch (13 staff, opened 2022-07) was closed in October 2025, with functions consolidated into Dalian (2025-08-25 release); ¥40.95m of extraordinary losses including office-closure costs were booked in FY2025 (annual securities report p.20). A Yokohama sales office is also listed (company page).

Registrations, certifications and memberships

From the company page:

• PCI DSS Ver 4.0.1 full compliance, registration no. SYPQ233UG1TP
• Privacy Mark no. 第17003614(04)号
• Funds transfer service provider (資金移動業者), Kanto Local Finance Bureau no. 00098 — the annual securities report p.5 dates the Type II registration to May 2025, the company page to March 2025
• Credit card number handling contractor (クレジットカード番号等取扱契約締結事業者); notified telecom carrier no. A-23-12267; paid employment placement licence 13-ユ-318648
• Member of: Fintech Association of Japan, Japan Consumer Credit Association, Payments Japan Association (キャッシュレス推進協議会), JNTO, Japan Omni-Channel Association, Japan Payment Service Association

Market context as stated by the company

From the FY2025 results release and annual securities report p.11:

• METI's cashless ratio target of ~40% by 2025 was met early; the 2024 ratio was 42.8% on the previous measure.
• Under a new calculation METI published on 2025-12-26, the 2024 ratio is stated as 51.7%, with targets of 65% by 2030 and 80% longer term.
• The company cites Yano Research's 2025年版 コード決済市場の実態と展望 for code payments expanding into online, subscription and high-ticket face-to-face categories.
• The March 2026 growth-plan deck puts QR code payment value CAGR at +120% and credit card at +10% and NFC at +2% for 2018–2024, citing the Payments Japan Association, the Japan Consumer Credit Association and the Bank of Japan.
• Japan's Smartphone Software Competition Promotion Act (スマホソフトウェア競争促進法) took effect in December 2025, expanding payment methods outside in-app purchase; the company cites this as the reason for founding StarPay-Entertainment (2025-12-19 release).

Product

StarPay — multi-cashless payment gateway

A merchant signs once with NETSTARS and gains QR code payments, credit cards, common point programmes, e-money and (from 2026) stablecoins, with unified onboarding, screening, settlement and reporting through the StarPay-Works management site (StarPay site). Deployment forms are a dedicated NETSTARS terminal, iOS/Android apps, or API integration into an existing POS, vending machine, ticket machine, locker or online checkout (StarPay FAQ). The marketing site states a 99.9% uptime guarantee, a 24/7/365 support centre, PCI DSS certification, and a minimum one-week onboarding time.

Brand coverage as of the March 2026 growth-plan deck: 40+ QR brands, 6 credit card brands, 7 e-money brands, with "10 or more" further payment brands planned for FY2026. The infographics page adds that the foreign QR services usable in Japan through StarPay originate from 13 countries/regions (data as of 2025-12).

StarPay-DX and adjacent products

Commercialization

Described in the annual securities report p.7:

• Payment: NETSTARS receives a merchant fee proportional to payment value; its revenue is that fee net of the payment provider's fee. For directly contracted merchants it receives the settlement from each payment brand, deducts its fee, and remits to the merchant the following month — which is why funds held on behalf of merchants (預り金, ¥30,131m at 2025-12-31) dominate the balance sheet. For OEM partners it takes a fee on total payment value. Where a referral agent (取次店) brought the merchant, NETSTARS pays that agent a volume-based fee, recorded as a cost.
• DX products: an initial development/onboarding fee, a monthly usage and maintenance fee that varies by function, and payment fees on volume flowing through the DX product.
• Terminals are sold to merchants that want them; terminal sales carry lower gross margin than payment fees and moved Q4 FY2025 gross margin down (FY2025 results Q&A — 2026-02-20).
• Stablecoin Pay publishes a 0.98% transaction fee (2026-07-13 release).

No general public price list for StarPay was found; the site routes to an application form or a consultation form.

Reported scale over time

GPV by fiscal year, from the March 2026 deck (year-on-year growth as labelled there): FY2019 +292%, FY2020 +56%, FY2021 +118%, FY2022 +94%, FY2023 +46%, FY2024 +21%, FY2025 +33%. Seven-year CAGR 2018-12 → 2025-12 is stated as +162%. Absolute values: FY2024 ¥1,594.2bn → FY2025 ¥2,122.8bn (annual securities report p.21). Q1 FY2026 GPV was ¥549.7bn, +17.6% year on year (Q1 FY2026 results release).

Revenue mix

Source: March 2026 deck. *FY2023 is restated in that deck to exclude the international communications business that ended in April 2023; the statutory FY2023 revenue is ¥3,720m (annual securities report p.2).

Customer concentration — the two disclosed counterparties above 10% of revenue (annual securities report p.19):

Announced customers, partners and launches

Merchant categories the company lists as examples: supermarkets and home centres, drugstores, shopping centres and department stores, airports, hotels and amusement facilities, gas stations, restaurants and food service, insurance (March 2026 deck). Sales reach is stated as roughly 300 sales partners including OEM partners, referral agents, regional banks and shinkin banks, and major POS vendors (same deck).

Stated plans

The company published a "2030 target state" in its March 2026 investor deck and growth-plan disclosure:

• GPV over ¥6tn, payment-related revenue over ¥10bn, total revenue over ¥12bn by FY2030, from the current business organically. The disclosure labels this a target GPV CAGR of +25.0% for 2023–2030, against a "progress CAGR" of +24.6% for 2023–2026.
• Gross margin maintained above 70%; operating and ordinary margin above 25% (FY2025 actual operating margin 6.1%).
• Overseas: add regions and products beyond the current Qatar, Cambodia and Mongolia.
• Further use of cloud computing, Web3.0 and AI to cut server and development cost, and to build vertical-specific payment/remittance/DX products; M&A named as a route into new domains.
• FY2026 guidance: revenue ¥5,760m (+20.3%), operating profit ¥500m (+70.8%), ordinary profit ¥707m (+59.7%), net income ¥493m (+1.7%), GPV ¥2,547.4bn (+20.0%) (FY2025 results release).
• No dividend has ever been paid, and none is planned for FY2026 (annual securities report p.17).

Founder

李 剛 (Ri Tsuyoshi) — founder, Representative Director, President & CEO. Born 1974-04-08. Holds 3,317,000 shares, 19.71% of shares outstanding excluding treasury stock, the largest single holding (annual securities report pp.56, 66).

• Graduated from the Department of Physics, Jilin University (company page).
• 1999-04: joined 株式会社CSK (now SCSK) (annual securities report p.66).
• 2005-04: joined 新日鉄ソリューションズ. At CSK and NS Solutions the work is described as Cisco network design and construction (company page).
• 2009-02: founded NETSTARS and became Representative Director, President & CEO.
• 2014-08: Representative Director of ウィ・ジャパン株式会社. 2018-10: director of NETSTARS ASIA HOLDINGS. 2019-10: director of the Japan-China Tourism Business Association.
• Longer profiles: Nikkei "ベンチャー魂のひと", Weekly Economist editor's interview.

The annual securities report p.16 lists dependence on this individual as a named business risk (likelihood: low; impact: medium), stating that executive officers and department heads are being added to reduce it.

Selected leadership

Selected for direct responsibility over technology, products, operations, finance, or engineering efficiency. Sources: annual securities report pp.66–71 and the company page. The complete statutory board and auditor roster remains in the filing.

Capital and financials

Announced rounds and alliances

Round names above are the company's own wording; NETSTARS has not used Series A/B/C labels in the sources reviewed.

Ownership and dilution

At 2025-12-31, founder and CEO 李剛 was the largest shareholder with 3,317,000 shares (19.71%), followed by KJP2 L.P. with 2,051,200 (12.19%). Other named holdings are largely custody and brokerage accounts; the filing does not identify a controlling shareholder. Outstanding stock options represented potential dilution of 11.28% of shares outstanding at FY2025 end (annual securities report pp.16, 56). The complete shareholder table and share-issuance history remain in the filing.

Financial history

Source: annual securities report p.2. The filing attributes the losses in FY2021–FY2024 to up-front investment in hiring, development and sales promotion. Liabilities are dominated by merchant funds held for settlement: 預り金 was ¥30,131m of ¥30,721m total liabilities at FY2025 end, and the filing attributes the year's ¥2,088m liability increase to that balance growing with GPV. A tax-loss carryforward remained at FY2025 end, flagged as a risk that will raise the effective tax rate once used up (p.16). An overdraft facility was signed on 2026-04-30 (release).

Engineering

Technology stack and platforms

There is no published stack page. Inferred from job postings, filings and blog posts, and labelled as inferred:

• Languages, from the closed/aggregator listings for the "PG/開発メンバー" role: Java, Go, .NET/C#, with Spring, Redis and Linux named (Green listing 180135). The PdM listing on the same board names JavaScript, Perl, Ruby, Java, Python, Go, MySQL and Kotlin (Green listing 180138). These are board-supplied tag lists, not required-skill statements, and should be treated as weaker evidence than the postings' own text.
• Cloud and runtime: AWS is named in the filing as the base of the fintech business, with multiple geographic regions used for redundancy, regular vulnerability assessment and unauthorised-access countermeasures (annual securities report p.15). The investor decks describe "cloud-native infrastructure with container technology" and state that using multiple clouds (AWS, Google) simultaneously provides stability and safety (March 2026 deck).
• Data: AWS Aurora with read/write separation, ClickHouse for OLAP, Tableau for analysis, and an in-house error-protection system the company calls NoWorryDB that keeps 8 hours of raw data for rapid recovery; real-time replication to a remote database with automatic failover is described as the DR design (engineering blog, 2024-06-04).
• Kubernetes: the company sells KubeStar, a container-as-a-service product built on Kubernetes with deployment/rollback, multi-cloud application management, container image vulnerability scanning and attack detection (product page).
• Tools named in current postings: Postman, OpenSearch, Jira, Confluence, Backlog, in-house test tooling, and Copilot for generative AI (CE posting, payment product planning posting).
• Interfaces: REST/Web APIs for POS vendors, EC vendors, vending machines, ticket machines, lockers and in-app charging; MPM and CPM QR flows (StarPay site, blog on MPM vs CPM, 2026-07-15). No public developer documentation portal was found — API specifications appear to be shared with partners under contract.

Systems

AI in the engineering organisation. The company states AI is applied to core-system efficiency, operational application monitoring, smart analysis of resource usage, customer support, and API integration development support; in Q1 FY2026 it moved internal support systems including the sales function onto AI. It reports that dollar-denominated server cost was roughly flat while GPV grew 33% year on year in 2025, and in the Q1 FY2026 Q&A says AI has cut per-transaction cost, development and integration effort, and support workload, letting it manage the platform without proportional headcount growth (Q1 FY2026 deck, Q1 FY2026 Q&A).

R&D. The FY2025 annual securities report states, under 研究開発活動, "該当事項はありません" — no applicable items (p.22). Total capital expenditure in FY2025 was ¥157.1m, of which ¥126.3m was capitalised software in progress (p.23). The company states it holds a patent on its self-developed QR code payment system, without naming the patent (p.16).

Where engineering sits

By location at 2025-12-31, from the facilities table (annual securities report p.23): Tokyo HQ 146 (+22 temporary), Dalian 70 (+4), Vietnam 3, Singapore 2. The Dalian and Vietnam subsidiaries are described in the filing as "mainly the company's development contractors" (主に当社の開発等の受託先), and the Dalian entity is designated a 特定子会社 (p.6). The Beijing branch of the Dalian subsidiary (13 people) was closed in October 2025 to concentrate development in Dalian (release). A blog byline places the code-scan work in a "技術本部 Innovation Dept." (2024-05-01).

As of 2026-07-29 the company's own careers site lists 20 open positions and none of them is a software engineering role; the technical-adjacent openings are a BtoB customer engineer, a store-DX product manager, and a payment product planning role, advertised at ¥5.0–10.0m (job list).

Technical background sought

No current software-engineering role was listed on the company's careers site as of 2026-07-29, so the reviewed sources do not establish which technical backgrounds are currently required or preferred for software engineers. Product disclosures confirm that the company operates payment, multi-party settlement, POS/device integration, stablecoin and PCI DSS-scoped systems, but those systems are not by themselves evidence of a hiring requirement.

Industry domain

Japanese retail payments regulation and the mechanics of multi-party settlement. From the filings:

• Regulatory surface: the Installment Sales Act (割賦販売法) and industry guidelines govern merchant management and security; NETSTARS holds a funds transfer service registration and runs cross-border JPQR Global, and names regulatory change as a risk (likelihood medium, impact small) (annual securities report p.15). PCI DSS 4.0.1 full compliance is maintained (company page).
• Settlement mechanics: the four-step flow of payment information and funds between consumer, merchant, QR provider and NETSTARS, and the resulting 預り金 liability, are set out in the annual securities report p.7; the balance was ¥30,131m at FY2025 end.
• Counterparty contracts: the disclosed framework agreements are with Tencent (WeChat Pay, from 2015-04-27, 1-year auto-renewal), Alipay Singapore (2021-07-30 to 2024-07-29, 3-year auto-renewal), NTT Docomo d払い (from 2018-05-22, terminable on notice), PayPay (from 2018-10-01, 1-year auto-renewal) and KDDI (from 2019-03-28, 1-year auto-renewal) (p.22).
• Geopolitical exposure: the filing names the possibility that Chinese-origin QR brands (Alipay, WeChat Pay) become unavailable through international disputes as a business risk (p.14). Overseas QR (inbound) was 7.3% of FY2025 GPV; the company estimates the Chinese-inbound decline cost about −1.2% of GPV and about −2% of revenue on an annualised basis (March 2026 deck, FY2025 Q&A).
• Blockchain: the 2026 product direction requires working across chains (Solana, Polygon, Aptos, Canton), wallets (MetaMask, Bitget Wallet, imToken) and stablecoins (USDC, USDT, JPYC, and Startale's JPYSC/USDSC), plus Circle's Gateway cross-chain infrastructure (2026-07-13 release, 2026-04-13 release).

No source reviewed states whether engineers are expected to acquire this domain knowledge, or how.

Working conditions

Notes

Not publicly disclosed

Search scope for the findings below (2026-07-29): the Japanese and English corporate sites, service pages and product subdomains; news, blog and IR indexes; current Jobcan careers listings and named third-party job boards; searches for NETSTARS, ネットスターズ, StarPay and major product names in Japanese and English; common documentation, API and status locations; GitHub organisation/name/domain searches; securities reports and certification disclosures.

• No separate engineering blog. The company blog carries product, partner and market posts; two posts describe architecture (high availability, 2024-06-04; AI code scan, 2024-05-01), and no further architecture posts appeared in the index through 2026-07. No public open-source repositories or engineering conference talks were found.
• No public developer documentation or API reference was found for StarPay; integration specifications appear to be shared with POS and EC vendors under contract.
• No public price list for StarPay or StarPay-DX. Only the Stablecoin Pay rate (0.98%) is published.
• No salary bands in the company's own postings beyond the annual ranges quoted; the parent-company average of ¥6,930k is the only firm-wide compensation figure, and it is not broken out by function.
• No status page or published SLA document; the 99.9% uptime figure appears only as a marketing claim on the StarPay site.
• Turnover / attrition is not published, and the filings give no retention figures.
• No ISO 27001 or SOC 2 is named anywhere reviewed; the certifications listed are PCI DSS 4.0.1 and Privacy Mark.
• Software engineering roles are absent from the company's own careers site as of 2026-07-29; the developer listings that exist are on third-party boards (Undated; accessed 2026-07-29).
• The patent the company says it holds on its QR payment system is not identified by number.

Inconsistencies across sources

• GPV growth rate, FY2025. The FY2025 results release (2026-02-12) states GPV of ¥2,122.8bn "前年同期比+136.2%"; the annual securities report (2026-03-25) p.18 and the results deck state the same ¥2,122.8bn at "+33.2%". The prior-year figure given in the same filing is ¥1,594.2bn.
• Headcount at 2025-12-31. 221 consolidated in the annual securities report p.10; 226 consolidated in the March 2026 investor deck and the infographics page, both stating the same as-of date. The company page gives 224 as of 2026-03-31.
• When 700,000 accounts was reached. The annual securities report p.6 states ~700,000 accounts as of 2025-12-31; the history slide in the March 2026 deck places 600,000+ in 2025 and 700,000+ in 2026.
• Funds transfer registration date. The company history page says March 2025 (資金移動業者2種登録); the annual securities report p.5 says May 2025 (第二種資金移動業登録完了).
• Reliability metrics use different definitions. 99.9% is a marketing uptime guarantee (StarPay site); 99.999% is a payment success rate excluding third-party-caused errors over Jan–Dec 2025 (Q1 FY2026 deck); 99.99% was stated as availability for calendar 2023 (blog, 2024-06-04). These are not the same measure and no single definition is published.
• Peer comparison changed between decks. The "overseas company B" gross margin in the PSP comparison is 37.1% in the March 2026 deck and 43.1% in the Q1 FY2026 deck, with a footnote in the latter attributing the change to a segment reclassification. Peer names are not disclosed in either.

Other

• Revenue is concentrated in two counterparties. PayPay and NTT Docomo together were 43.4% of FY2025 revenue and 45.1% of FY2024 revenue (annual securities report p.19); the filing separately names dependence on QR payment providers as a risk (likelihood low, impact large) (p.15).
• The company describes its own market as maturing. The competition risk in the FY2025 filing states that the QR payment market "is shifting to a mature stage" and that differentiating on service content or fee rates has become harder than before (p.14) — wording that also appears in the March 2026 growth-plan disclosure.
• A cluster of Web3 announcements landed in 2026. Between April and July 2026 the company announced StarPay-X, Circle Gateway development, and MOUs with Aptos, Bitget Wallet, AllScale, Startale Group and Canton Foundation, then launched Stablecoin Pay on 2026-07-13. The Q1 FY2026 Q&A states there were 7 partners at the time, expected to reach about 10 (Q&A).
• The DX line has been shrinking while payments grow. DX/mini-app revenue fell from ¥360m (FY2024) to ¥317m (FY2025), 40.2% below plan, while payment-related revenue rose 30.0% and beat plan; FY2026 guidance puts DX back at ¥410m (March 2026 deck).
• Business lines have been discontinued before. The international communications and international SMS business started in 2010 was ended in April 2023, and the Mobile QQ Japan edition released in 2011 with Tencent and KDDI is listed as discontinued (annual securities report p.5).
• What is published openly: quarterly results decks, a written main-Q&A document for every quarter since Q3 FY2023, the annual growth-plan disclosure required of TSE Growth listings, retail-investor decks roughly twice a year, and commissioned analyst reports. The next update of the growth-plan disclosure is stated as March, after the FY2027 results (growth-plan disclosure). None of it is available in English.
• English coverage is partial. The English site carries About, News, Services, IR, Careers and Contact; StarPay, StarPay-mini, StarPay-Order and KubeStar product pages are Japanese-only, and all IR documents reviewed are Japanese-only.

Resources

Official

• Corporate site · English
• Company information — CEO message, officers, history, profile
• Infographics — "NETSTARS by the numbers"
• Services index
• StarPay · FAQ · digital gift certificates
• StarPay-DX · Regi-less · StarPay-mini · StarPay-Robot
• StarPay-X · KubeStar · Area point service
• News and notices index · Blog
• IR · IR news · results releases · securities reports · results presentations · other IR materials
• Careers (Jobcan)

Filings and IR documents (Japanese)

• FY2025 annual securities report — 2026-03-25 · FY2024 — 2025-03-28 · FY2023 — 2024-03-29
• FY2025 results release — 2026-02-12 · FY2025 results deck — 2026-02-12 · FY2025 results Q&A — 2026-02-20
• Q1 FY2026 results release — 2026-05-14 · Q1 FY2026 deck — 2026-05-14 · Q1 FY2026 Q&A — 2026-05-19
• Business plan and growth potential — 2026-03-31 · 2025 edition — 2025-02-28 · 2024 edition — 2024-02-29 · 2023 edition, at listing — 2023-09-26
• Retail investor deck — 2026-03-26 · 2025-09-29 · 2025-06-16
• Subsidiary establishment, StarPay-Entertainment — 2025-12-19
• Beijing branch closure — 2025-08-25
• Joint venture with Finext Limited — 2024-08-14
• Employee shareholding association incentive increase — 2026-02-24
• Overdraft facility — 2026-04-30

Press releases (JA)

• Stablecoin Pay launch — 2026-07-13
• Canton Foundation MOU — 2026-07-07
• Startale Group MOU — 2026-06-15
• AllScale MOU — 2026-06-08
• Bitget Wallet MOU — 2026-06-04
• Aptos MOU — 2026-05-08
• AEON Delight Connect AI call solution — 2026-04-15
• Circle Gateway multi-chain development — 2026-04-13
• StarPay-X announcement — 2026-04-08
• Second USDC in-store trial — 2026-04-02
• ¥6.6bn funding from KKR, SIG, LUN Partners — 2021-04-14 · PR TIMES
• Additional funding, ~¥3.0bn May–September 2020 — 2020-09-30
• Itochu capital alliance — 2019-11-21 · SCSK / T-Gaia capital alliance — 2019-11-21
• NTT East group / Itochu Techno-Solutions capital alliance — Undated; accessed 2026-07-29; c. early 2018

Blog posts with technical content (JA)

• High availability: the mechanisms behind it — 2024-06-04
• AI-enhanced code scan in the StarPay app — 2024-05-01
• MPM vs CPM in QR payments — 2026-07-15
• Introducing StarPay — 2023-03-30

Third-party coverage and profiles

• Itochu — capital alliance release, 2019-11-21 (JA)
• SCSK — capital alliance release, 2019-11-21 (JA)
• Nikkei — "ベンチャー魂のひと" profile of the CEO (JA)
• Weekly Economist — editor's interview with the CEO (JA)
• Payment Navi — coverage index (JA)
• IPO Kiso — IPO details (JA)
• IR Bank — disclosure index (JA)
• Green — job listings (JA)
• en-gage — recruiting page (JA)
• INITIAL / Speeda startup profile (JA)
• STARTUP DB profile (JA)
• Yahoo! Finance — company profile (JA)