Application modernization startup OpenLegacy Inc. has raised $20 million to help it pursue its mission of helping financial services companies move their information technology infrastructures into the cloud-native era.

Japan’s SBI Holdings Inc. was the sole investor in the latest round, announced late last week. It brings OpenLegacy’s total funding to date to $70 million.

Princeton, New Jersey-based OpenLegacy is an interesting startup that helps organizations breathe new life into older, legacy business applications. It does so by automating and standardizing the process of extending them with microservices-based application programming interfaces. The APIs make it possible for developers to add new functions to older applications without making risky and expensive changes to their code base.

Microservices are self-contained software functions that usually run a single business process and can be deployed as needed. Many modern applications are now constructed entirely of microservices because the architecture is more flexible, faster and reliable than that of traditional monolithic applications.

Although many companies have toolkits for building and managing APIs, OpenLegacy claims to be the only one targeting the large installed base of enterprise applications that were created before the advent of cloud services. It says its software can integrate APIs into complex legacy applications within minutes.

SBI Holdings said it was using OpenLegacy’s technology to build new Internet banking features for its portfolio of Japanese banks, and to create a new blockchain-based payment app called Moneytap.

“OpenLegacy will enable our portfolio companies to quickly launch digital innovations, integrating, leveraging, and extending our legacy systems in a fraction of the time, all without changing the underlying systems,” Yoshitaka Kitao, SBI Holdings’ chief executive officer, said in a statement.

SBI Holdings joins a number of financial services companies that are already using OpenLegacy’s tools to modernize their apps and services, including Citigroup Inc., Liberty Mutual Group and BNP Paribas Group.

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