Why This London Startup Just Raised $3.5M to Fix Stablecoin FX

Jan de Vries · 2026-10-08

Stablecoins are everywhere these days. But here's the thing—moving them between currencies? That's still a mess. Especially if you're trying to swap anything other than US dollars. That's exactly the problem IMMIX is tackling. The London-based AI-native trading firm just raised $3.5 million (€3.12 million) to build FX infrastructure for stablecoin payments beyond the dollar. And honestly, it's about time someone did. ### The Problem: Stablecoin FX Is Broken Picture this: You're a payment company processing cross-border transfers. Your customer wants to send money from a euro-backed stablecoin to a yen-backed one. Simple, right? Not even close. According to IMMIX, that single conversion can splinter into three or four separate FX trades. Each one comes with its own spread, fee, and prefunding requirement. Stack those costs up, and your margins start bleeding—especially if you're handling recurring transfers. And outside the dollar market? It gets worse. Fewer buyers and sellers mean less liquidity, which means higher costs and more friction. ### How IMMIX Plans to Fix It IMMIX's approach is refreshingly direct: they act as principal on both sides of the trade. Instead of letting a conversion break into multiple legs, they collapse it into a single, directly priced transaction. The company has built a deep-learning model that forecasts market conditions across more than 10,000 instruments. That's not just tech for tech's sake—it's what allows them to price accurately and reduce the cost and complexity of stablecoin FX. Since 2024, IMMIX's systems have processed over $25 billion (€22.3 billion) in customer trading volume. So yeah, they're not just talking theory here. ### Who's Behind IMMIX? Dr. Andrew Mann and Dr. David Twomey founded the company. Both hold PhDs from UCL's Computer Science department and have institutional trading experience from Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Virtu Financial. "Payment businesses need certainty about what their customers will receive and reliable access to currency conversion whenever money needs to move," Mann said. "We're combining years of experience building high-frequency trading systems for institutional clients with AI pricing to reduce the cost and complexity of stablecoin FX, especially beyond the dollar." That mix of deep technical expertise and real-world trading experience is exactly what caught the attention of investors. ### The Funding Round The $3.5 million round was backed by Crane Venture Partners, BTSE, and Portfolio Ventures. It follows a $2.7 million (€2.5 million) Seed round led by MassMutual Ventures, with participation from Ripple Ventures in late 2023. Krishna Visvanathan, co-founder and partner at Crane Venture Partners, put it simply: "Stablecoins have the potential to fundamentally change how money moves around the world, but much of the infrastructure needed to make that possible still has to be built." He added that Mann and Twomey saw an important problem early—particularly beyond the dollar—and bring a unique combination of skills to solve it. ### What's Next for IMMIX? The fresh capital will go toward three things: - Developing the company's AI-powered pricing engine - Expanding available liquidity - Growing the partner distribution network IMMIX is inviting payment service providers (PSPs), money transfer operators, stablecoin issuers, trading venues, and other platforms to explore FX partnerships. Partners can connect via request-for-quote, streaming prices over API, or access IMMIX's pricing on public venues—both centralized and decentralized exchanges. The ultimate goal? To become the foundational layer for the stablecoin payments ecosystem, enabling instant, frictionless, and scalable global money movement. It's a big ambition. But if anyone can pull it off, it might just be the team that's already processed $25 billion in volume. For now, though, the focus is clear: make stablecoin FX cheaper, faster, and less fragmented—especially for anyone tired of watching margins disappear into a tangle of stacked trades.