OpenFX, the cross-border payments infrastructure company whose mission is to convert, settle and move money across the globe, has announced the launch of OpenFX Ventures, a new investment arm that will partner with early-stage founders across the United States, Europe, Latin America and the APAC region.

The company said the new unit is designed to channel support to builders from the earliest stage, drawing on OpenFX's experience of two years spent building across many markets at once.

Moving money across borders has long involved intermediary-heavy processes, delays and costs that newer entrants are working to strip out, and corporate investment arms have become a familiar structure among financial infrastructure companies looking to stay close to the startups tackling that friction.

OpenFX Ventures will focus on innovators developing financial applications that solve specific, high-impact challenges in four areas of payments and financial infrastructure:

• AI-powered payment tooling
• Credit and capital markets infrastructure
• Next-generation applications
• Routing and clearing infrastructure

Taken together, the four focus areas span distinct layers of the payments stack, from application-level tooling to the routing and clearing rails that move funds between institutions.

The firm said it has already invested in a robust portfolio of fast-growing companies and is actively seeking out other founders who are pushing the space forward.

"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," said Prabhakar Reddy, Founder and CEO of OpenFX. "We've spent two years building across many markets at once, and we've learned exactly where the friction sits. OpenFX Ventures lets us partner with the founders working on it."

Reddy framed the venture arm against the funding environment facing startups modernizing legacy payment systems, a challenge the company says it understands from direct operating experience across multiple markets.

Beyond capital, portfolio companies will receive connectivity to OpenFX's markets and early access to upcoming products and capabilities from the infrastructure provider — an arrangement that ties the startups' development to the underlying network OpenFX operates.

"It took a village to get OpenFX this, and we're only at day one. We'd like more builders to have that kind of support from the start. That's what OpenFX Ventures is," said Karan Shah, Chief of Staff at OpenFX, who leads OpenFX Ventures.

The announcement did not disclose the size of the investments or name individual portfolio companies, details that will be worth tracking as the arm establishes its footprint across the four regions.

Source: GlobalFinTechSeries