Long before Lightning was a buzzword, a small team in Fukuoka was already shipping it onto microcontrollers. Nayuta has been working at the intersection of Bitcoin, Lightning, and the Internet of Things since 2015, making it one of the longest-running Lightning-focused companies in the world. We are excited to back founder Kenichi Kurimoto and the Nayuta team as they continue that decade-long mission.

Nayuta is best known for Ptarmigan, the fourth Lightning Network implementation ever shipped on mainnet, after LND, c-lightning, and Eclair. Written in C with a deliberately small footprint, Ptarmigan was designed to run on resource-constrained hardware, including Raspberry Pi Zero in SPV mode, opening the door to Lightning-native IoT devices. The team has demonstrated this in the real world, partnering with Chubu Electric Power, the third-largest utility in Japan, to test Lightning micropayments for electric-vehicle charging.

That focus matters more every year. As AI agents, sensors, and physical devices begin to transact autonomously, the world will need a payment rail with sub-cent fees, instant settlement, no chargebacks, and global reach. Bitcoin's Lightning Network is the only credible candidate, and machine-to-machine payments may well be its largest long-term use case.

Nayuta also brings something rare to the portfolio: a serious foothold in Japan, deep relationships with licensed enterprises, and the engineering culture to ship low-level protocol code. Kenichi has been quietly building toward this moment for ten years. We are proud to support the next ten.