TLDR
- OpenFX is a stablecoin-powered cross-border payment infrastructure provider that enables institutions to move money globally with near-instant settlement, deep liquidity, and exceptional cost efficiency.
- By combining stablecoins with local payment rails, OpenFX replaces fragmented, multi-day correspondent banking workflows with real-time FX settlement, with 98% of transactions settling in under 60 minutes and costs up to 90% lower than traditional systems.
- The company serves institutional clients including remittance companies, fintechs, payment processors, digital banks, neobanks, brokerages, and payroll providers.
- OpenFX raised $94M in its Series A backed by leading global investors: Accel, Atomico, Lightspeed Faction, M13, Northzone and Pantera. This funding will accelerate the company's mission to become the liquidity engine powering cross-border payments worldwide.
Why M13 invested
Money moves all over the world, every minute, every day. What hasn’t changed in a century is the way that money moves around, according to Latif Peracha, M13’s general partner who leads the firm’s investing strategy across fintech, blockchain and money infrastructure.
Peracha’s investment thesis examines how technologies such as blockchain and AI are shaping the future. His portfolio includes Rho, Lightning Labs and Solana, all building foundational technology aimed at disrupting the usual network effects and protocols.
Reddy and his team started OpenFX in January 2024 with technology aimed at providing almost instant cross-border money movement. It replaces the traditional banking chain with a real-time FX settlement network that optimizes liquidity and connects local payment rails and digital assets. Today OpenFX enables near-instant FX settlements across borders, making money transfers 99% faster – and with over 98% of transactions settling in under 60 minutes – and available 24/7/365 across 15+ currencies.
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“The fact that it takes an institution or company several days to move money from Dubai to Brazil doesn’t make a lot of sense and has a lot of secondary, tertiary and negative impacts,” Peracha said.
He explained that he and Reddy “had a lot of common ground and vision,” and Peracha agreed that OpenFX’s technology, with stablecoins at its core, would “be able to fix many of the issues that have plagued the archaic system.”
“It's not unlike voiceover IP disrupting landlines,” Peracha said. “We will still have banks. We will still have Swift, but those systems will become archaic because of a category leader like OpenFX, which is changing the market and allowing money to move much, much faster. This is a step-change improvement: how money moves around the world, and the impacts on things like GDP, cannot be underestimated if they are successful.”
That alignment was mutual. Reddy said, “We’re fortunate to partner with a group of world-class investors who understand the scale of transformation underway in global payments. M13 joined as our only new partner, selected for their deep conviction in next-generation financial infrastructure and hands-on approach with founders.”
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The origin story: built by someone who saw the gap firsthand
M13 looks for exceptional founders building with the largest tailwinds at their back. In OpenFX, Peracha found both.
Prior to building OpenFX, Reddy co-founded FalconX, a digital asset prime brokerage valued at around $8 billion.
While there, he said he realized a few things. First, a customer could send $100 million worth of bitcoin from a US-based custody wallet to a Japanese custody wallet in a matter of minutes. However, to send that same amount in actual dollars would take days, not minutes.
Complicating matters could be a national holiday, a weekend or a messaging lost in the correspondent chain, and the entire amount was sent back.
“The global FX market processes more than $200 trillion annually but the core settlement infrastructure remains largely unchanged from decades ago,” Reddy said.
Reddy assembled a team of operators from JP Morgan, Citi, PayPal, Slack and Affirm. Most of them are people Reddy worked with in some capacity over the past 20 years.
“Based on what Prabhakar did in his last company, he's ideally suited to take on this challenge,” Peracha said. “It's often hard to see that an entrepreneur still has the intrinsic motivation to do it again because startups are hard. That combination of an entrepreneur with history, who will focus on the long term and has domain expertise, is incredibly unique and special.”
The $4 trillion problem in cross-border payments
In the world of artificial intelligence, customers lead a new paradigm shift by demanding quicker access and moveability for their money, Reddy said. Behind that shift are AI agents that will be powering the movement of money in real time. Yet more than $4 trillion in working capital sits locked in pre-funded accounts globally. It’s the direct consequence of a settlement system that still runs on banking hours.
“There's a lot happening today in the world getting slowed down because money is taking three to five days to go from remittance industries to payroll processors to payment gateways,” Reddy said. “Stablecoins enable money to basically bypass the existing Swift layer and just move 24/7, 365 days.”
That said, the stitching of stablecoins with a solution wasn’t happening — until OpenFX. No one was trying to tinker with the money movement plumbing from the ground up because it’s complicated, Reddy said. He explained that you not only have to understand how to stitch together various technologies but also understand licensing, compliance, 24/7 operations, market-making, stablecoins and FX technologies. And do all of that while building for institutional scale.
“If real-time payments are complex and expensive, they don’t scale,” Reddy said. “Very few people in the world want to take on this challenge. Having built and operated in this space before, I was uniquely qualified to solve this problem.”
For Peracha, OpenFX is already demonstrating what that future looks like. That focused execution is reflected in the results: OpenFX expanded from $4 billion to over $45 billion in annualized payment volume.
The infrastructure behind the speed
OpenFX developed a multi-layer architecture that connects legacy banking systems with digital-native infrastructure, enabling institutional adoption without forcing incumbents into binary migration.
That architecture means pricing, treasury, payroll, remittances, and neobank settlement models can be rethought around cost, speed and programmability and not the constraints of legacy rails. These changes echo broader trends in tokenized cash and stablecoin rails.
Fintech companies can then convert any currency at a fraction of the cost, in many cases, 90% lower costs when compared to traditional FX providers. Over 98% of transactions using OpenFX were able to settle in under 60 minutes.
Having money moving quickly means a fintech company doesn’t have to raise large amounts of capital or pre-fund it in any geography now. “Not every early-stage fintech company has access to very good rates,” Reddy said. “A lot of them rely on their banking partners, sometimes third-party fintech companies. Usually, if you look at the market benchmarks, the cost of the cross-border money limit is somewhere between 50 basis points to 1.5 percent. Literally collapsing that down by like 90% gives ‘year one’ rates to everyone.”
Peracha sees this as a foundational shift, not an incremental one: "This is a step-change improvement. If they are successful, how money moves around the world and the impacts on things like GDP cannot be underestimated."
What this means for founders, technologists, investors
- The cost and complexity of moving money globally is no longer a fixed constraint. OpenFX is rebuilding the rails and, for the fintech companies that plug in, that changes what's possible.
- The company’s technology uses a multi-layer liquidity architecture that reduces or removes the need for pre-funded nostro accounts and massive balance sheets at intermediaries.
Read more about OpenFX
The Stablecoin Surge and Fintech’s Future
OpenFX raises $23 million led by Accel to build near-instant cross-border transactions
Introducing OpenFX: Making money move as freely as data
Follow OpenFX
Learn more at www.openfx.com or www.openfx.com/blog.
Get a demo at www.openfx.com/get-a-demo
Follow the company on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/openfx/
Follow Prabhakar Reddy at www.linkedin.com/in/prabhakar2reddy/
TLDR
- OpenFX is a stablecoin-powered cross-border payment infrastructure provider that enables institutions to move money globally with near-instant settlement, deep liquidity, and exceptional cost efficiency.
- By combining stablecoins with local payment rails, OpenFX replaces fragmented, multi-day correspondent banking workflows with real-time FX settlement, with 98% of transactions settling in under 60 minutes and costs up to 90% lower than traditional systems.
- The company serves institutional clients including remittance companies, fintechs, payment processors, digital banks, neobanks, brokerages, and payroll providers.
- OpenFX raised $94M in its Series A backed by leading global investors: Accel, Atomico, Lightspeed Faction, M13, Northzone and Pantera. This funding will accelerate the company's mission to become the liquidity engine powering cross-border payments worldwide.
Why M13 invested
Money moves all over the world, every minute, every day. What hasn’t changed in a century is the way that money moves around, according to Latif Peracha, M13’s general partner who leads the firm’s investing strategy across fintech, blockchain and money infrastructure.
Peracha’s investment thesis examines how technologies such as blockchain and AI are shaping the future. His portfolio includes Rho, Lightning Labs and Solana, all building foundational technology aimed at disrupting the usual network effects and protocols.
Reddy and his team started OpenFX in January 2024 with technology aimed at providing almost instant cross-border money movement. It replaces the traditional banking chain with a real-time FX settlement network that optimizes liquidity and connects local payment rails and digital assets. Today OpenFX enables near-instant FX settlements across borders, making money transfers 99% faster – and with over 98% of transactions settling in under 60 minutes – and available 24/7/365 across 15+ currencies.
“The fact that it takes an institution or company several days to move money from Dubai to Brazil doesn’t make a lot of sense and has a lot of secondary, tertiary and negative impacts,” Peracha said.
He explained that he and Reddy “had a lot of common ground and vision,” and Peracha agreed that OpenFX’s technology, with stablecoins at its core, would “be able to fix many of the issues that have plagued the archaic system.”
“It's not unlike voiceover IP disrupting landlines,” Peracha said. “We will still have banks. We will still have Swift, but those systems will become archaic because of a category leader like OpenFX, which is changing the market and allowing money to move much, much faster. This is a step-change improvement: how money moves around the world, and the impacts on things like GDP, cannot be underestimated if they are successful.”
That alignment was mutual. Reddy said, “We’re fortunate to partner with a group of world-class investors who understand the scale of transformation underway in global payments. M13 joined as our only new partner, selected for their deep conviction in next-generation financial infrastructure and hands-on approach with founders.”
The origin story: built by someone who saw the gap firsthand
M13 looks for exceptional founders building with the largest tailwinds at their back. In OpenFX, Peracha found both.
Prior to building OpenFX, Reddy co-founded FalconX, a digital asset prime brokerage valued at around $8 billion.
While there, he said he realized a few things. First, a customer could send $100 million worth of bitcoin from a US-based custody wallet to a Japanese custody wallet in a matter of minutes. However, to send that same amount in actual dollars would take days, not minutes.
Complicating matters could be a national holiday, a weekend or a messaging lost in the correspondent chain, and the entire amount was sent back.
“The global FX market processes more than $200 trillion annually but the core settlement infrastructure remains largely unchanged from decades ago,” Reddy said.
Reddy assembled a team of operators from JP Morgan, Citi, PayPal, Slack and Affirm. Most of them are people Reddy worked with in some capacity over the past 20 years.
“Based on what Prabhakar did in his last company, he's ideally suited to take on this challenge,” Peracha said. “It's often hard to see that an entrepreneur still has the intrinsic motivation to do it again because startups are hard. That combination of an entrepreneur with history, who will focus on the long term and has domain expertise, is incredibly unique and special.”
The $4 trillion problem in cross-border payments
In the world of artificial intelligence, customers lead a new paradigm shift by demanding quicker access and moveability for their money, Reddy said. Behind that shift are AI agents that will be powering the movement of money in real time. Yet more than $4 trillion in working capital sits locked in pre-funded accounts globally. It’s the direct consequence of a settlement system that still runs on banking hours.
“There's a lot happening today in the world getting slowed down because money is taking three to five days to go from remittance industries to payroll processors to payment gateways,” Reddy said. “Stablecoins enable money to basically bypass the existing Swift layer and just move 24/7, 365 days.”
That said, the stitching of stablecoins with a solution wasn’t happening — until OpenFX. No one was trying to tinker with the money movement plumbing from the ground up because it’s complicated, Reddy said. He explained that you not only have to understand how to stitch together various technologies but also understand licensing, compliance, 24/7 operations, market-making, stablecoins and FX technologies. And do all of that while building for institutional scale.
“If real-time payments are complex and expensive, they don’t scale,” Reddy said. “Very few people in the world want to take on this challenge. Having built and operated in this space before, I was uniquely qualified to solve this problem.”
For Peracha, OpenFX is already demonstrating what that future looks like. That focused execution is reflected in the results: OpenFX expanded from $4 billion to over $45 billion in annualized payment volume.
The infrastructure behind the speed
OpenFX developed a multi-layer architecture that connects legacy banking systems with digital-native infrastructure, enabling institutional adoption without forcing incumbents into binary migration.
That architecture means pricing, treasury, payroll, remittances, and neobank settlement models can be rethought around cost, speed and programmability and not the constraints of legacy rails. These changes echo broader trends in tokenized cash and stablecoin rails.
Fintech companies can then convert any currency at a fraction of the cost, in many cases, 90% lower costs when compared to traditional FX providers. Over 98% of transactions using OpenFX were able to settle in under 60 minutes.
Having money moving quickly means a fintech company doesn’t have to raise large amounts of capital or pre-fund it in any geography now. “Not every early-stage fintech company has access to very good rates,” Reddy said. “A lot of them rely on their banking partners, sometimes third-party fintech companies. Usually, if you look at the market benchmarks, the cost of the cross-border money limit is somewhere between 50 basis points to 1.5 percent. Literally collapsing that down by like 90% gives ‘year one’ rates to everyone.”
Peracha sees this as a foundational shift, not an incremental one: "This is a step-change improvement. If they are successful, how money moves around the world and the impacts on things like GDP cannot be underestimated."
What this means for founders, technologists, investors
- The cost and complexity of moving money globally is no longer a fixed constraint. OpenFX is rebuilding the rails and, for the fintech companies that plug in, that changes what's possible.
- The company’s technology uses a multi-layer liquidity architecture that reduces or removes the need for pre-funded nostro accounts and massive balance sheets at intermediaries.
Read more about OpenFX
The Stablecoin Surge and Fintech’s Future
OpenFX raises $23 million led by Accel to build near-instant cross-border transactions
Introducing OpenFX: Making money move as freely as data
Follow OpenFX
Learn more at www.openfx.com or www.openfx.com/blog.
Get a demo at www.openfx.com/get-a-demo
Follow the company on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/openfx/
Follow Prabhakar Reddy at www.linkedin.com/in/prabhakar2reddy/
Read more
The views expressed here are those of the individual M13 personnel quoted and are not the views of M13 Holdings Company, LLC (“M13”) or its affiliates. This content is for general informational purposes only and does not and is not intended to constitute legal, business, investment, tax or other advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters and should not act or refrain from acting on the basis of this content. This content is not directed to any investors or potential investors, is not an offer or solicitation and may not be used or relied upon in connection with any offer or solicitation with respect to any current or future M13 investment partnership. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Unless otherwise noted, this content is intended to be current only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in funds managed by M13, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by M13 is available at m13.co/portfolio.