The deal gives OpenFX its first “regulated presence” in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, as Embed holds licenses in all EEA states and the U.K., via the Financial Conduct Authority, according to a Tuesday (June 2) news release.
“As we continue to pursue our mission to bring modern financial rails to the entire world, we are proud to be joined by the team at Embed,” OpenFX Founder Prabhakar Reddy said in the release. “They have built a spectacular product that will help grow our capabilities, particularly in Europe.”
The deal is expected to close in the third quarter, pending regulatory approval, the release said. Terms of the acquisition were not released. Embed’s founding team will take on operational roles at OpenFX, and members of Embed’s engineering and finance teams will join their new parent.
“We built this stack for a different use case, but the underlying infrastructure is exactly what a cross-border platform needs: virtual IBANs, multirail bank connectivity, EEA and U.K. coverage,” Embed Co-Founder Alex Schoonkind said in the release. “Combining it with OpenFX’s distribution is the right home for the technology.”
OpenFX is a relatively new business, emerging from stealth last year with $23 million in funding. The company raised another $94 million in a Series A round in March.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
At the time, Reddy compared OpenFX’s work to that of Anthropic. Before that artificial intelligence startup’s Claude model came along, companies had to develop and train their own models and oversee their own infrastructure.
“We’re building the equivalent for global financial infrastructure,” Reddy said at the time. “We are the pipes through which all global FX will flow. The remittance company in Brazil, the neobank in Singapore, the payroll processor in Dubai—none of them should have to rebuild what we’ve built. They should just use it.”
Meanwhile, chief financial officers are facing challenges as the dynamics around cross-border payments change.
CFOs spent years trying to centralize operations to reduce duplication, enforce governance and accelerate decision-making across far-flung offices. Now, those same initiatives are leaving them vulnerable in a changing compliance landscape.
