OpenFX raises USD $94 million to speed cross-border payments

OpenFX has raised USD $94 million in Series A funding in a round led by Accel, Atomico, Lightspeed Faction, M13, Northzone and Pantera.

Existing investors Flybridge and Hash3 also participated. OpenFX now moves more than USD $45 billion a year in cross-border payments and has signed more than 100 institutional customers.

Founded two years ago, OpenFX provides foreign exchange and payment infrastructure for financial institutions, including fintechs, neobanks, remittance platforms and payroll processors. It supports 15 currencies and employs 105 people across four continents.

The business is targeting a longstanding problem in cross-border money movement, where banks and intermediaries often rely on settlement processes that take days and embed costs in exchange rates and fees. Its model uses local fiat currencies at both ends of a transaction, with stablecoins transferring value between markets in the middle.

According to OpenFX, 98% of transactions settle in under 60 minutes. The company has also launched in the UAE and expanded into Latin America, Southeast Asia and Europe.

Founder view

Founder and Chief Executive Officer Prabhakar Reddy linked the business to his experience in Dubai's remittance market, where he saw workers queue to send money home and pay a meaningful share of their wages in transfer costs.

"I believe there are two ways to touch 8 billion lives: get 8 billion individual customers, or get a thousand financial institutions that each serve millions. We chose the latter path. Two years in, $45 billion a year later - it's working," said Prabhakar Reddy, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, OpenFX.

Reddy said he started the company to make money move as freely as data. In his view, today's cross-border payments system is still shaped by legacy banking infrastructure and commercial incentives that favour delay and opacity.

"I started OpenFX two years ago with a simple mission: make money move as freely as data," he said.

Infrastructure push

OpenFX is building a broader financial infrastructure stack rather than a single payments tool. Alongside collections, foreign exchange and payouts, its system includes banking arrangements for treasury and settlement accounts, yield on idle capital, and compliance and liquidity architecture.

The company believes the hardest part of cross-border payments lies in foreign exchange, including liquidity access, pricing and settlement mechanics. Solving those issues gives it a route into the wider infrastructure needs of payment service providers and other financial institutions.

"There is more to moving money than the blockchain, this is something that we think is often ignored in this industry, and something we spend an enormous amount of time thinking about," said Reddy.

He added that OpenFX does not want to be seen primarily as a crypto business. "We didn't want to be a crypto company moving Stablecoins, we wanted to be an FX company moving money across the globe," he said.

Growth metrics

OpenFX outlined steep growth over a short period. It moved USD $500,000 in its first month of operations, then USD $500,000 a week eight weeks later, followed by USD $500,000 a day three months after that. Volumes later reached USD $500,000 every minute.

The company also said it has reduced fee structures in the UAE corridor, compressing AED pricing from 0.30% to the mid-single digits. It aims to repeat that pattern in each market it enters.

Reddy argued that the need for faster settlement is growing as software systems take on more economic decision-making. He said autonomous AI agents will require financial infrastructure that operates continuously and in real time across currency pairs.

"The first generation of these agents is being deployed right now - both internally within OpenFX, and by our clients. Within ten years, I believe AI agents will be the largest category of FX users on the planet," said Reddy.

He also pointed to geopolitical instability, capital controls and sharp currency moves as reasons delays in moving money can carry greater risk for businesses and households.

Scaling up

The new funding will support hiring across product, engineering, operations and go-to-market roles, according to Reddy. He said building global financial infrastructure remains difficult because of licensing timelines, banking relationships, corridor-by-corridor liquidity work and a broad regulatory burden.

"For fifty years, money moved at the speed of bureaucracy. We are making it move at the speed of the internet. That shift - that one shift - changes everything downstream. That's what we're here to do," said Reddy.