Introducing OpenFX Ventures

Today we're launching OpenFX Ventures, our investment arm for the next generation of fintech founders.

The first generation of digital financial companies: Revolut, Nubank, Stripe, Alipay, and Robinhood created roughly half a trillion dollars of enterprise value over the last decade. They have largely been regional champions, and are only now starting to flex their global expansion. Historically, there were steep mountains to climb.

The onset of agentic payments will intensify the need for modern money movement rails, just as tokenized cash and securities is transforming capital markets with 24x7 settlement infrastructure. Software that transacts on behalf of individuals and businesses has no patience for three-day settlement windows, nine-to-five trading hours, and bank holidays. In the coming years, programmable rails will be what drives the market forward.

Going global

We are already seeing this innovation in the domestic payment space. Many countries across the globe have sophisticated RTP systems that settle in seconds, 24 hours a day. These systems are powered by APIs that grant service providers that plug into them the kind of transparency and speed that is required for modern business.

Cross-border payments simply have not kept up. The average transaction has to pass through multiple correspondents, each holding pre-funded balances, each taking fees and time. It’s a slow, opaque system that when something breaks, nobody is quite sure where the money is.

Stablecoins are doing for money what the shipping container did for freight: providing one standardized unit that can move across the network without needing to be unpacked at each port. But stablecoins aren’t enough to solve the problem, between these rails and applications that run on them is a layer of middleware that needs to be built.

That is where going global gets expensive. It takes years of work on licenses, local banking partners, liquidity, and automation to bring this middleware online. APAC requires separate licensing processes across Singapore, Hong Kong and India. The UAE has several regulators that differ depending on where you operate and what you do. Each market also has its own service providers, built to local standards.

This is the problem OpenFX was built to solve, and as we’ve worked on solving it, we’ve found places that we believe are worthy of investment.

Where we're investing

OpenFX builds horizontal infrastructure, across many corridors at once. The founders we want to partner with are tackling a different kind of problem, focused on a single challenge or market, a single type of customer where they can go deep.

We're particularly keen to partner with founders building in four areas:

Next-gen applications

AI is rewriting the interface, and blockchains are rewriting the infrastructure underneath it. Together, we think they make possible a new class of fintech applications that will move many more consumers and businesses onto modern payment systems.

Routing and clearing infrastructure

A lot of clearing infrastructure still has to be built: across spot FX, local-currency stablecoins, and further out for forwards, futures, swaps, and options. It won't be built on a single design. Some flows need real-time settlement, others are better served by slower, batched net settlement.

Onchain credit

Stablecoins have made moving money faster, but the credit underneath hasn't kept pace. We're interested in credit that originates onchain and is repaid from payment flows visible in real time, rather than repackaged off-chain loans.

AI-native payment operations

Identity checks, compliance, RFI case management, and transaction reconciliation drive a large share of cost per transaction in payments, and much of that work is still people reading documents and matching spreadsheets. We think AI will change that cost structure more than any rail upgrade.

What we bring

Capital. We write supporting checks alongside a lead investor, for startups at stages ranging from Seed through Series B

Connectivity. Access to the many markets we operate in across the US, Europe, LatAm, and APAC, so a new corridor doesn't mean starting from zero.

Capabilities. Preferential pricing on our current products, early access to what we build next, and a direct line to our product and engineering teams when you integrate.

About OpenFX

OpenFX builds infrastructure to move, convert, and settle money across borders on stablecoin rails. In under two years it has grown to more than $80 billion in annualized payment volume, serving over 100 fintechs across the US, Europe, LatAm, and APAC. OpenFX is backed by Accel, Lightspeed Faction, Northzone, and Pantera, among others.

Get in touch

If you're building in any of these areas, or you think we've drawn the map wrong, we'd like to hear from you at ventures@openfx.com.