OpenFX Raises $94 Million for Cross-Border Stablecoin Payments

Foreign exchange (FX) startup OpenFX has raised $94 million in a new funding round.

The company’s Series A round, announced Tuesday (March 31), comes as it works to use stablecoins for faster cross-border transactions.

Writing on the company blog, Founder and CEO Prabhakar Reddy compared the company’s work to that of Anthropic. Before that artificial intelligence (AI) startup’s Claude model, he argued, companies had to build and train their own models and manage their own infrastructure.

“We’re building the equivalent for global financial infrastructure. We are the pipes through which all global FX will flow,” he said. “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.”

Tuesday’s announcement comes a little less than a year after OpenFX emerged from stealth with $23 million in new funding.

The company did not reveal a valuation associated with this newest round, but a source familiar with the matter put that figure at $500 million in an interview with Reuters.

Reddy described growing up in Dubai during the 1990s and 2000s and seeing lines stretch outside Western Union branches as workers from overseas sent money back home. When he returned in 2022 after years in the Bay Area, the lines were still there.

“People still pay 5-7% of their paychecks to send money home. Money that might have otherwise gone towards building a better life,” he wrote. “Thirty years later, on the other side of a technological revolution that put supercomputers in everyone’s pocket – almost nothing had changed. That gap is where OpenFX began.”

The goal, he said, was to show that “stablecoins could do for money what the internet did for information,” moving the value of fiat payments across borders in seconds.

Writing about the cross-border payment space earlier this month, PYMNTS noted that stablecoins still accounted for a small portion of international transactions. Meanwhile, many of the benefits associated with these tokens—like speed, lower costs and flexibility—are now being provided by the existing financial system.

“They are being delivered in a way that is integrated with regulatory frameworks, banking relationships and enterprise workflows,” that report said. “In other words, the transformation of cross-border payments is not waiting for a new system to replace the old one. It is happening within the system itself.”