When Prabhakar Reddy left FalconX—the crypto prime brokerage he helped build into an $8 billion business—he had a specific frustration in mind. Moving mid-market foreign exchange volume through traditional correspondent banking networks, he'd watched transactions crawl along for days while fees quietly accumulated in the 2–5% range. There had to be a better way, he figured, and perhaps stablecoins offered one.
Two years later, his answer to that problem just raised $94 million.
OpenFX, Reddy's New York-based startup, announced a Series A round on March 31 at roughly a $500 million valuation. The backing came from a cluster of prominent venture firms: Accel, Atomico, Lightspeed Faction, M13, Northzone, and Pantera. It's the kind of investor lineup that signals serious conviction in a nascent market—one that's beginning to look less experimental and more inevitable with each passing quarter.
The company's pitch is straightforward, if ambitious. By using stablecoins as backend infrastructure for foreign exchange settlements, OpenFX claims it can compress what normally takes days into less than an hour. More than 98% of its transactions now settle within 60 minutes, the company says. That's a stark departure from the sluggish correspondent banking chains that still dominate cross-border flows.
Whether that speed advantage translates into lasting competitive moats remains an open question. But the growth numbers, at least, suggest customers are noticing. OpenFX reported $45 billion in annualized payment volume at the time of the raise—up from $4 billion just a year earlier. It's the kind of tenfold leap that tends to attract attention in venture circles, even if some of that velocity reflects the startup's small initial base.
The company launched in 2024 with annualized volume around $10 billion and raised $23 million in seed funding led by Accel in May 2025. From there, things accelerated quickly. OpenFX currently operates in four markets: the U.S., U.K., UAE, and India, with earlier forays into Mexico and Brazil throughout 2025. The fresh capital will fund expansion into Southeast Asia and Latin America, regions where remittance flows are heavy and traditional banking infrastructure often lags.
OpenFX positions itself less as a direct competitor to payment giants and more as plumbing for them. The company offers API-based settlement infrastructure to remittance providers, neobanks, payroll platforms, payment processors, and brokerages. The idea is to let those firms route FX transactions through stablecoin rails—avoiding the maze of intermediary banks that add both time and cost to conventional settlements.
The timing, if nothing else, appears favorable. Stablecoin adoption in cross-border payments has been gathering momentum, shifting from crypto-native circles into more mainstream financial corridors. FXC Intelligence estimated the global cross-border payments market at roughly $208 trillion earlier this year. Meanwhile, an IMF departmental paper published in late 2025 documented stablecoin flows overtaking unbacked cryptocurrency in cross-border transactions by 2024. Visa Consulting, for its part, projected adjusted stablecoin transaction volume would surpass $10 trillion in 2025.
None of this has gone unnoticed by competitors. XFX, a rival targeting similar fiat-to-stablecoin infrastructure, raised $17 million in Series A funding from Castle Island Ventures just days before OpenFX's announcement. Fireblocks launched a stablecoin payments network in November 2025, and Euronet integrated Fireblocks for treasury settlements the month prior. The market, in other words, is getting crowded—quickly.
Still, Reddy's background gives OpenFX a measure of credibility that pure startups might lack. FalconX, the crypto prime broker he co-founded, reached an $8 billion valuation in 2022, a peak that positioned it among the sector's most substantial survivors. That pedigree likely smoothed the path to a half-billion-dollar valuation for a two-year-old company with, until recently, fairly modest volume.
OpenFX now employs somewhere between 51 and 200 people, according to its LinkedIn profile—an imprecise range that reflects either rapid hiring or a reluctance to pin down exact headcount. The company maintains offices in Miami, New York, and London, a geographic spread that mirrors its target corridors.
What happens next will depend, in large part, on whether OpenFX can sustain its growth trajectory while navigating regulatory uncertainty. Stablecoin infrastructure may be gaining legitimacy, but it's hardly a settled regulatory environment. And as the company scales into new markets—particularly those in Southeast Asia and Latin America—it will encounter varied compliance landscapes, some more welcoming than others.
For now, though, the company appears to be riding a wave of institutional interest in stablecoin-based settlement infrastructure. Whether that wave represents a fundamental shift in how money moves across borders—or just another chapter in the long, uneven evolution of fintech—remains to be seen. But with $94 million in fresh capital and a tenfold growth story to tell investors, OpenFX has bought itself time to find out.
