Toyota Finance has opened subscriptions for a 1 billion yen tokenized bond that retail investors in Japan can buy directly through the Toyota Wallet mobile payment app. The one-year bond starts at 100,000 yen, or about $676, and does not require buyers to open a securities account because it is being distributed directly by Toyota Finance. The bond carries a 1.72% annual interest rate and runs on blockchain infrastructure provided by Japanese security-token company BOOSTRY. Toyota said the direct distribution approach lets it handle applications, communications with bondholders and investor perks inside the same ecosystem. Buyers may receive Toyota Wallet balances and qualify for benefits such as Fuji Speedway tickets and test-drive experiences, including Lexus vehicles and selected classic Toyota models. The sale marks Toyota Finance’s second security token bond issuance after its first deal in March 2025, which was sold through securities firms.

Japanese multinationals are cashing in on a weaker yen, prompting a wave of earnings forecast upgrades in the latest reporting season. Toyota, Honda, Sony and Ryohin Keikaku have all revised their guidance higher. Okasan Securities data shows 159 of about 1,600 Topix constituents have raised full-year forecasts since July 1, versus just 12 downgrades — an adjustment ratio of 86%, the highest since fiscal 2016.

Walden Robotics, a startup spun out of Toyota Research Institute in January, emerged from stealth on July 15 with a $300 million seed round and an $1.1 billion valuation. The financing was co-led by Toyota and Deviation Capital, with participation from NVIDIA, Boeing, Samsung Ventures, Prologis Ventures and CoreWeave Ventures. The company reached unicorn status in about six months. Led by co-founder and CEO Russ Tedrake, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who previously led TRI’s robotics and machine learning team for nearly a decade, Walden is built on research that includes Diffusion Policy, Universal Manipulation Interface, Large Behavior Models, OpenVLA and the open-source simulator Drake. Its founding team also includes CTO Ben Burchfiel, COO Kerri Fetzer-Borelli, Chief Product Officer Dave Johnson, Chief Strategy Officer Adrien Gaidon, Chief Architect Siyuan Feng and AI lead Rares Ambrus. Walden’s pitch centers on commercializing TRI’s robotics work inside real production environments, starting with Toyota’s manufacturing system. The company says its Large Behavior Models are designed to let robots learn and transfer skills across tasks instead of being programmed one workflow at a time. TRI’s prior research used nearly 1,700 hours of robot data, 1,800 real-world tests and more than 47,000 simulation tests. Walden is combining autonomous operation with remote human assistance as it pushes those systems into factories and warehouses.

NVIDIA said it is deepening its partnership with Toyota to bring AI and hardware technologies into vehicles, robotics and infrastructure. The collaboration starts with in-vehicle systems, where Toyota is using NVIDIA DRIVE HDX and DRIVE AGX, running DriveOS, to build next-generation smart vehicles with L2+ to L2++ advanced driving and situational awareness functions. Toyota is also adopting a code-assist AI model trained on NVIDIA Megatron-LM technology and the Nemotron dataset to help engineers generate, review and verify in-vehicle software under strict industry compliance requirements. The work also covers manufacturing and urban infrastructure. Toyota is using NVIDIA Omniverse and Isaac Sim to build digital twins of factory production lines under a simulation-first development model. In Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture, Toyota subsidiary Woven by Toyota is developing the Woven City AI Vision Engine with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and the Megatron-Core framework for traffic control and mobility forecasting. NVIDIA separately said it is expanding its Jetson AGX Thor lineup for robots and widening deployment of its open-source Nemotron model to companies including NTT DATA and Hitachi.

Walden Robotics, a humanoid robotics startup spun out of Toyota’s robotics research lab, has raised about $300 million in seed funding at a valuation of $1.1 billion, according to Bloomberg. The round was co-led by Deviation Capital and Toyota Motor, with participation from Toyota’s strategic investment and early-stage venture units. Other investors included Nvidia, Boeing, AE Ventures, Samsung Ventures and CoreWeave Ventures. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Walden develops its own hardware, software and AI models. The company is focused on deploying general-purpose robots in manufacturing and logistics facilities to take on tasks workers consider physically demanding. Co-founder Russ Tedrake said Walden has already started selling humanoid robots to customers across multiple industries. That includes pilot projects at Toyota factories in North America, where the robots are handling repetitive work such as loading and unloading auto parts and cleaning equipment. Tedrake previously served as an executive at the Toyota Research Institute and also taught robotics at MIT.

Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group has become the most valuable company in Japan’s stock market, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The move puts Japan’s largest bank ahead of Toyota Motor and marks the first time a bank has held the top spot since the current structure of the country’s three major banking groups was established. On Monday, Mitsubishi UFJ shares rose 2.3% to 3,541 yen, lifting the group’s market capitalization to 42 trillion yen, or about $259 billion. That surpassed Toyota’s market value of about 41 trillion yen and Kioxia Holdings’ roughly 36.7 trillion yen. The development is notable for Japan’s equity market because the top position has shifted to a bank rather than an industrial or technology-linked name. The figures cited in the report were compiled by Bloomberg and carried by Odaily, with Jin10 named as the source in the brief.