OpenFX, the cross border payments infrastructure company, has launched OpenFX Ventures, an investment arm that will back early stage founders in the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific.
The arm will target four areas: AI powered payment tooling, credit and capital markets infrastructure, next generation applications, and routing and clearing infrastructure. Founders it backs get capital, connectivity to OpenFX’s markets and early access to products still in development. OpenFX said it has already invested in a portfolio of fast growing firms and wants more founders working on the problem.
The company builds the systems that move, convert and settle money across borders. It says it has reached more than $80 billion in annualised transaction volume in under two years and now serves over 100 fintechs across the same four regions. Its backers include Accel, Lightspeed Faction, NFX, Northzone, Pantera and Variant.
Founder and CEO Prabhakar Reddy framed the launch around a funding gap. “Most of the world’s money still runs on systems built before the internet, and the companies that will modernize it are finding it harder to raise,” he said. Two years of building across several markets at once, he added, showed OpenFX exactly where the friction sits.
The arm is led by Karan Shah, OpenFX’s Chief of Staff. “It took a village to get OpenFX this far, and we’re only at day one,” Shah said. “We’d like more builders to have that kind of support from the start.”
Digital Trade Outlook’s View: Capital With a Network Attached
OpenFX is buying distribution as much as equity. A startup that takes its money also plugs into OpenFX’s markets and products, so each investment could become a customer on its network. Routing and clearing, one of the four focus areas, is the layer OpenFX itself runs, which makes the overlap hard to miss. With no fund size, portfolio names or investment targets disclosed, its first public deals will show whether this works more like a venture fund or a customer pipeline.
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