OpenFX Raises $94M to Scale Stablecoin FX Payments

OpenFX, a startup focused on foreign-exchange market making and remittances, has raised $94 million in a funding round as reported by Reuters. The company looks to expand its stablecoin-based infrastructure for faster cross-border payments.

The round was led by a group of venture investors including Accel, Atomico, Lightspeed Faction, M13, Northzone, and Pantera, according to reporting on the deal. The capital raise values the company at approximately $500 million, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The funding comes as stablecoins continue to gain traction as a settlement layer for cross-border payments, particularly in use cases where traditional foreign exchange and remittance rails remain costly, fragmented, or operationally slow.

OpenFX targets institutional pain points in FX settlement

Founded in 2024, OpenFX is building infrastructure that combines traditional banking rails with blockchain-based settlement, using stablecoins as a bridge asset to enable near-instant foreign exchange conversion and cross-border transfers.

The company’s focus is on solving a specific inefficiency in the global payments stack: moving larger-value transactions quickly across currencies without the delays and slippage often associated with legacy FX channels.

Speaking about the market gap, founder Prabhakar Reddy said the infrastructure challenge became especially clear in larger transaction sizes, where executing transfers between $1 million and $10 million can quickly consume available liquidity and become prohibitively expensive. He added that very few users are willing to absorb 2% to 5% in conversion costs for major currency transfers such as U.S. dollars to euros—an inefficiency that helped shape OpenFX’s model.

Reddy previously worked on crypto prime brokerage platform FalconX, and said the idea for OpenFX emerged after observing long queues at remittance collection points in Dubai, highlighting the continued friction in traditional money movement systems despite advances in digital finance.

Stablecoins move deeper into payments infrastructure

OpenFX is part of a broader group of market infrastructure firms using blockchain-based currencies to modernize cross-border settlement, particularly for businesses moving larger sums of capital.

According to the company, more than 98% of transactions on its platform settle in under 60 minutes, compared with two to five business days in the legacy FX market. The firm positions this performance as evidence that stablecoin-linked settlement can materially improve speed and predictability in business-to-business and institutional payment flows.

That positioning aligns with a wider industry shift, as stablecoins increasingly move beyond crypto trading and into enterprise treasury, remittances, payroll, and cross-border business payments. Rather than displacing banks outright, firms like OpenFX are attempting to create middleware that links traditional financial institutions with always-on blockchain settlement.

Expansion targets Southeast Asia and Latin America

OpenFX said the new capital will be used to support expansion into Southeast Asia and Latin America, two regions where stablecoin adoption has accelerated due to a mix of FX volatility, high remittance demand, and growing demand for faster alternatives to correspondent banking.

The company currently operates in the United States, United Kingdom, UAE, and India, and said it processes more than $45 billion in annualized payment volume, up from $4 billion a year earlier.

According to OpenFX, that growth has been driven by demand from fintech companies, neobanks, remittance providers, and payroll platforms.

The company had previously raised $23 million last year.

Investor backing signals confidence in stablecoin rails

The size of the round is notable not only because it marks a significant step-up in OpenFX’s valuation and capital base, but also because it reflects continued investor conviction around stablecoin-powered financial infrastructure at a time when institutional use cases are becoming more defined.

Commenting on the company’s model, Niklas Zennström, founder and CEO of Atomico, compared OpenFX’s role in money movement to the way cloud infrastructure abstracted complexity for software developers. He said the company’s global liquidity rails and always-on, real-time settlement model could unlock a meaningful shift in cross-border financial infrastructure.

The comparison is instructive: much of the current stablecoin infrastructure thesis is no longer centered on consumer crypto adoption, but on whether blockchain-based settlement can become a programmable backend for real-world financial services.

Why it matters

OpenFX’s funding round underscores a broader market trend: stablecoins are increasingly being framed as infrastructure rather than speculative assets.

In this case, the company is targeting one of the most entrenched inefficiencies in finance—cross-border FX settlement for larger-value transactions—by combining liquidity provision, market making, and blockchain-based transfer rails into a single operational layer.

If OpenFX can continue scaling volumes while maintaining sub-hour settlement and expanding regionally, it may strengthen the case that stablecoins are becoming a practical tool for institutional-grade foreign exchange and payment operations, particularly in markets where traditional systems remain slow or expensive.