Moneytree, a mobile financial technology startup headquartered in Japan, today announced a US$1.6m (150 million yen) seed round in funding led by DG Incubation Inc., the investment subsidiary of prolific Japanese tech company Digital Garage. Other investors include former senior executives from PayPal, MasterCard, and Morgan Stanley.

Moneytree gives people secure, on-demand access to their financial data via a single passcode-protected app. It currently supports over 80 percent of Japanese financial institutions by market share, and over 1,000 institutions will be supported by 2014.

The app first launched on the iTunes App Store in April 2013 and was immediately featured as the App Store Staff Pick. Moneytree has since remained a featured app for six consecutive months, becoming one of the top 50 apps on the entire App Store in Japan. To date, Moneytree has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, and aggregated over 15 million transactions completed. It is also frequently outranking official apps of major banks in Japan.

'We are at the beginning of a mobile-first era in money management,' said Paul Chapman, CEO and founder of Moneytree. 'Moneytree believes that individuals should be at the core of the banking experience. We have created a personal finance app designed with a radically different approach. We leave behind concepts of accounting and rigid budgeting, and instead embrace ideas from the 'quantified self' movement. Think of Moneytree as a fitness tracking app for your money. It helps you quantify your cash usage, fine tune how you think about money and stay financially fit.'