XFX nets $17M

Miami startup XFX has raised a $17 million Series A to tackle a very specific bottleneck in global money movement: the awkward handoff between ordinary bank money and dollar-backed stablecoins. Castle Island Ventures led the round, with Haun Ventures and Coinbase Ventures joining in. The company says it is building foreign-exchange infrastructure that lets institutions move between fiat currencies and stablecoins in real time, instead of waiting on the slower plumbing of banks and payment processors. (finance.yahoo.com) That sounds narrow. It is not. Stablecoins move fast because they ride on blockchains and settle around the clock. The problem starts when those tokens have to touch the traditional financial system. A payment can move onchain in seconds, then stall for days while a bank transfer catches up. XFX is trying to remove that delay by combining stablecoin transfers with its own liquidity network, so local currency is available on the other side without the usual lag. (haun.co) The founders know this problem because they ran into it at Bitso, one of Latin America’s biggest crypto companies. XFX was founded in 2025 by Santiago Alvarado, Jason Losh, and Alberto Sánchez Tello, all former Bitso executives. Alvarado had led product and Bitso’s business efforts. Losh had run engineering at scale. Sánchez Tello came from more traditional finance roles at firms including Deutsche Bank, UBS, and BlackRock before Bitso. At Bitso, they watched stablecoins become useful for cross-border payments while the FX layer stayed fragmented, manual, and capital-hungry. (finance.yahoo.com) That last point matters more than the crypto gloss. The real pain is not only speed. It is trapped capital. If a market maker sends out peso liquidity today and does not get replenished for days because the banking side moves slowly, someone has to fund that gap. XFX’s pitch is that better routing and tighter matching between buyers and sellers can push more volume through with less idle money sitting around as insurance. Alvarado has described the product as an “engine” designed to do exactly that. (finance.yahoo.com) For now, the company is keeping the map small. XFX currently supports trades involving U.S. dollars, Mexican pesos, Colombian pesos, and stablecoins. That is a deliberate choice. Instead of pretending to solve global FX all at once, it is going deep on corridors where stablecoins are already useful and where Latin American payment flows are large enough to expose the weaknesses of existing rails. Its customers include financial institutions, money transmitters, payment processors, market makers, and crypto exchanges. (refreshmiami.com) The new round also follows a seed financing that showed how quickly investor interest has shifted. In June 2025, XFX announced a $9.1 million seed led by Haun Ventures, with Castle Island, Coinbase Ventures, Paxos, Bitso, and others participating. Less than a year later, Castle Island has taken the lead in the Series A, a sign that stablecoin infrastructure is no longer being funded as a side bet on crypto trading. It is being funded as payment infrastructure. (xfx.io) XFX says one connection to its platform can replace the need to pre-position capital across different venues and rails. It offers API access, real-time quote and transaction tracking, and a settlement model built for institutional treasury workflows. The company plans to use the new funding to hire more quants and deepen relationships with banks and trading desks. Right now, it is still a young company with a short currency list. But it is already promising consistent execution on transfers from $100,000 to more than $50 million per transaction. (xfx.io)