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OpenFX Payment Infrastructure Raises $94M for Asia

OpenFX Payment Infrastructure Raises $94M for Asia

Woodenscale AI
Woodenscale AI
5 min read

OpenFX builds payment infrastructure for instant cross-border FX, treasury flows, and payouts, and it has now raised $94 million in a Series A round as it pushes deeper into Southeast Asia and Latin America. The deal values the company at about $500 million. The old way of moving money across borders still leaves businesses stuck with multi-day settlement windows, hidden FX spreads, and too much capital parked in pre-funded accounts. Founded in 2024 by Prabhakar Reddy, OpenFX is pitching a stablecoin-native network for fintechs, neobanks, remittance companies, payroll platforms, and enterprises that want money movement to happen in minutes instead of days. For anyone watching OpenFX payment infrastructure as a category bet, this round suggests investors think the hardest layer in global payments isn’t the consumer app. It’s the back-end liquidity engine.

What is OpenFX payment infrastructure and how does it work?

OpenFX is an API-first FX and settlement infrastructure built for institutions. It allows businesses to collect funds, convert between fiat and stablecoins, and send local payouts without building their own trading desk or crypto stack. Customers can onboard in about 72 hours, connect via API or web interface, lock FX rates, and settle multiple times a day. The platform supports USDC, USDT, 40+ currency pairs, and 25+ local rails.

What stands out is the workflow. OpenFX handles FX liquidity and market-making, while partners keep their own frontend and compliance layer. In setups like BankSocial, the orchestration layer decides whether to route payments via FedNow, RTP, bank rails, or stablecoins, and OpenFX powers the cross-border FX leg.

This removes a lot of manual work—no chasing quotes, no pre-funding accounts, and no maintaining multiple bank relationships. The API automates quotes, trades, deposits, and withdrawals, while operating 24/7 without requiring in-house FX teams.

Earlier, payments could take 2–5 days due to pre-funding and settlement delays. With OpenFX, most transactions settle within 60 minutes, and some in under 10 minutes, with significantly lower costs.

Who founded OpenFX and why now?

The founding story

OpenFX was started in January 2024 by Prabhakar Reddy, who now serves as founder and CEO. Reddy has said the company came out of frustration with a global FX system that still runs on old settlement logic while internet-era businesses expect software-speed money movement. The company launched after roughly 18 months in stealth, then emerged in May 2025 with a $23 million seed round led by Accel.

There’s also a personal angle here. In OpenFX’s Series A announcement, Reddy described growing up in Dubai and seeing migrant workers queue outside money transfer counters to send cash home. That’s not a throwaway founder anecdote. It explains why OpenFX talks less like a crypto startup and more like a company obsessed with settlement speed and payout reliability. Corridor economics, too.

Why Prabhakar Reddy fits this market

Reddy isn’t a first-time founder guessing his way through infrastructure. He previously co-founded FalconX in 2018, which became one of the better-known institutional digital asset brokerages, and before that he founded Nfusion, a company later acquired by BookMyShow. He also spent time as an investor at Accel in India and is a BITS Pilani graduate. That gives him a rare mix of founder, operator, and capital-markets experience.

That background matters because OpenFX sits in a messy intersection: banking relationships, liquidity management, compliance, digital assets, and enterprise software. Plenty of founders understand one piece. Fewer have actually built through trading infrastructure and institutional finance before. Reddy has.

Traction, fundraising, and positioning

OpenFX is live, processing over $45B in annualized payments (up from $4B) and serving 100+ institutional clients across the U.S., U.K., UAE, and India. In Dec 2025, Sourav Karmakar (ex-CoinDCX) joined to lead India and INR products.

The $94M Series A (Mar 2026) was backed by Accel, Atomico, Lightspeed Faction, M13, Northzone, and Pantera, following a $23M seed in May 2025. The company plans expansion in Southeast Asia and Latin America, focusing on instant cross-border FX.

Competition: BVNK, Conduit, Bridge (Stripe), and traditional correspondent banking. OpenFX differentiates with institutional-grade FX liquidity and near-instant settlement, building corridor-specific execution in markets like Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Argentina.

Why does the OpenFX funding round matter?

This round gives OpenFX something every infrastructure company eventually needs: room to build the boring stuff that’s actually hard. Liquidity depth. More local rails. More compliance coverage. More product and operations hires. Reddy has said global licensing takes longer than founders expect and that last-mile liquidity gets solved corridor by corridor. That’s a blunt reminder that cross-border payments isn’t a pure software problem.

It also changes the company’s roadmap math. Southeast Asia and Latin America aren’t random expansion dots on a slide deck. They’re regions where local real-time payment systems are improving fast, but international movement between those systems is still clunky. If OpenFX can sit between those rails and offer faster FX plus instant payouts, it becomes much harder to swap out than a single-feature remittance tool.

Then there’s the investor signal. Accel doubled down from seed to Series A, while firms like Pantera and Northzone joined in. The thesis isn’t “stablecoins are cool.” It’s that stablecoins may be the cheapest way to rebuild the settlement layer without asking customers to become crypto-native themselves.

Why are stablecoin cross-border payments growing now?

Because the addressable market is enormous, and the legacy system still isn’t fixed. BIS said global FX turnover averaged $9.5 trillion a day in April 2025, up sharply from $7.5 trillion a day in April 2022. That’s a staggering amount of money moving through infrastructure that was never designed for 24/7 software businesses, always-on payroll, or automated treasury workflows.

Stablecoins are growing at the same time. An IMF paper published in late 2025 said stablecoin issuance had doubled since 2024 to about $300 billion by September 2025, while a separate IMF working paper estimated 2024 stablecoin cross-border transactions at about $2 trillion. Fireblocks’ 2025 survey also found that 90% of respondents were already live, piloting, or planning stablecoin programs. This isn’t fringe anymore. It’s turning into financial plumbing.

That doesn’t mean every cross-border payment will move on stablecoin rails. Far from it. Regulation, treasury controls, local licensing, and bank relationships still matter a lot. But the direction is obvious: companies want programmable money movement, and they want it without the weekend shutoffs and capital drag of older rails.

Will OpenFX payment infrastructure beat old FX rails?

Maybe. But this is the kind of company that gets tested by execution, not by storytelling.

OpenFX already has real scale, a repeat founder, and a market that’s finally ready to take stablecoin-backed settlement seriously. Still, the hard part starts now. Expanding corridor by corridor across Southeast Asia and Latin America means more banking partners, more compliance work, more liquidity, and more proof that the company can stay reliable when volume climbs again. What to watch next is whether it can turn this funding round into durable dominance in the corridors that legacy banks still handle badly.

Read how Palmonas Funding $40M for Retail Stores is helping expand its offline presence and scale retail operations.

FAQ

What funding did OpenFX raise? 

OpenFX raised $94 million in a Series A round announced on March 31, 2026. Accel led the round and Lightspeed Faction, M13, Northzone, Pantera, and Atomico also participated, coming after a $23 million seed round in May 2025.

How does OpenFX handle cross-border payments faster than banks?

OpenFX works as an API-first FX and settlement layer that lets businesses get quotes, exchange currencies, and settle or withdraw funds multiple times a day. It uses stablecoins such as USDC and USDT as part of the back-end flow, supports 40+ currency pairs and 25+ local rails, and says most transactions settle in under 60 minutes instead of the usual multi-day bank cycle.

Who is OpenFX founder Prabhakar Reddy?

Prabhakar Reddy is a repeat fintech founder who started OpenFX in 2024 and previously co-founded FalconX in 2018. Before that, he founded Nfusion, which was acquired by BookMyShow, and he also spent time as an investor at Accel in India after graduating from BITS Pilani.

Is OpenFX a stablecoin company or an FX infrastructure startup?

It’s best understood as an FX infrastructure startup that uses stablecoins as a settlement tool rather than as the end product. OpenFX sells API-based FX and treasury management. It also sells instant payout infrastructure to fintechs, neobanks, remittance providers, and enterprises that want faster global money movement without exposing end users to crypto complexity.

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