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Seed Watch: The Early-Stage Startups Modernising Legacy Systems in Fintech & Cybersecurity

Author

Ofodile Iloanya
May 30, 2025

Welcome to our weekly edition of Seed Watch- a segment of Market Insyte Digest focused on sharing some of the latest and most intriguing Pre-seed & Seed funding news grabbing the headlines in the startup world.

This week, the top 3 funded early-stage startups operate in the fintech and cybersecurity industries, addressing various problems such as inefficient legacy systems and data security. Find out more about these startups below.

  • Startup Name: OpenFX

  • Industry: Fintech

  • Region: United States

  • Amount (USD): $23 million

  • The problem it is solving: The $200 trillion FX market still runs on outdated 1970s infrastructure, leading to slow (2–7 day) settlements, capital inefficiencies ($4 trillion locked up), and hundreds of billions in fees. OpenFX is tackling this by providing real-time, 24/7 FX settlement, dramatically improving transaction speed and cost.

  • What the Funds Will Be Spent On: Expansion into Latin America and Asia. Treasury management product development. Regulatory compliance across key jurisdictions. Scaling its FX platform and onboarding more financial institutions

  • Startup Name: Catena Labs

  • Industry: Fintech

  • Region: United States

  • Amount (USD): $18 million

  • The problem it is solving: Legacy financial systems are not built to support AI agents and agentic commerce—they lack identity frameworks, fast and cost-effective settlement, and trust infrastructure required for autonomous, AI-driven transactions. Catena is addressing these limitations by building an AI-native financial institution that can support the transactional and regulatory needs of the emerging AI economy.

  • What the Funds Will Be Spent On: Development of a fully regulated AI-native financial institution. Expansion of open-source infrastructure (Agent Commerce Kit - ACK). Integration with stablecoins and emerging payment standards. Building tools to handle agent identity, trust, and compliance at scale

  • Startup Name: Pixee

  • Industry: Cybersecurity

  • Region: United States

  • Amount (USD): $15 million

  • The problem it is solving: Modern developers, accelerated by genAI tools, ship code faster than security teams can keep up. Legacy application security tools often lack the automation and intelligence needed to triage vulnerabilities efficiently and deliver trusted code fixes. Pixee solves this gap by empowering security teams to match the velocity of AI-assisted development with automated triage and production-ready fixes embedded directly into development workflows.

  • What the Funds Will Be Spent On: Further product development of its AI-powered security automation platform. Expansion of go-to-market and sales teams. Scaling adoption among enterprise customers