With DEPO Ventures’ Backing, Plexo Builds a Common Language for Fragmented Stablecoin Networks

• PO Ventures’ USD 290K investment
• Its longer-term vision extends beyond stablecoins toward multipurpose financial trust infrastructure

Stablecoins may already be moving money across borders, but the financial institutions using them still have a surprisingly old-fashioned problem: they struggle to connect with one another. Every new relationship can mean a separate technical integration, a new contract, another compliance review — and weeks of exchanging documents by email, leaving a market that is supposed to make international payments faster with a considerable amount of manual work behind the scenes.

To Build a Common Language for Fragmented Networks

Prague-based startup Plexo wants to build the infrastructure that sits between these fragmented networks. This July, the company, founded by fintech entrepreneur Anton Titov (CEO) and software engineer Roman Shprenger, has raised USD 290K in Pre-Seed funding from the  well-known Czech VC firm DEPO Ventures (invested in WanderWallet, among others) to develop what it describes as a neutral coordination and clearing layer for financial institutions working with stablecoins.

The timing is deliberate: Regulatory frameworks in Europe and the US have only recently begun to give institutions reasonable clarity to treat stablecoins as a serious part of financial infrastructure rather than an experimental technology, while payment providers, exchanges, OTC desks, and other financial companies are already using dollar-backed stablecoins for cross-border transactions.

‘The market got hundreds of capable FI companies, but each speaks its own language, its own compliance format, its own document standards, its own rails,’ Mr Titov explains. ‘Plexo is an attempt to bring them back to one common language, so companies can actually talk to each other.’

The problem became apparent to the entrepreneur through his previous work in cross-border payments. Before Plexo, he built an on/off-ramp business connecting Europe, the UK and the US with emerging markets, where every new payment corridor required another fiat connection to be built and maintained.

His conclusion was that bilateral integration simply does not scale. In addition to another technical connection, every additional corridor adds another set of operational, compliance, and contractual relationships, effectively requiring every participant in the network to learn how to communicate separately with every other participant.

The founding duo came at the problem from different directions. While Mr Titov had spent years building financial infrastructure, Mr Shprenger’s background is in large-scale advertising systems, real-time auctions, and event processing, where the underlying challenge was also to match parties operating according to different technical rules.

‘The main lesson is that bilateral integration does not scale,’ the CEO reflects. ‘Every additional corridor does not just add operational risk, it multiplies operational cost, because maintaining more corridors in more modes is always harder.’

A Single Connection to a Wider Financial Network

Plexo’s answer is to let an institution connect to its network once rather than build a separate relationship with every counterparty. The platform helps identify a verified institution, standardizes and packages its Know Your Business and compliance information, facilitates communication and document exchange, and creates an audit trail, while the actual funds remain outside Plexo and settlement takes place directly between the participating financial institutions.

The analogy the founders use is SWIFT, although they restrain from positioning Plexo as a replacement for the established banking network. Instead, they see stablecoin finance as developing its own increasingly large collection of payment networks and proprietary ecosystems, with the interoperability between them missing.

This distinction is more relevant as large financial and payments companies develop their own stablecoin infrastructure. Mr Titov points to Visa, Mastercard, and Circle among the bigger companies building networks around their respective ecosystems, arguing that Plexo’s opportunity lies precisely in connecting institutions that do not necessarily operate on the same rails.

‘Every new member does not just get access to existing corridors, it adds corridors for everyone already in the network,’ he adds. ‘That compounding effect makes the tenth member more valuable than the first.’

Starting Small With High-Value Transactions

Plexo is not attempting to build the entire automated network from day one. Its initial model is based on large OTC transactions, typically between USD 100K and several million dollars, with the first members of the founding cohort already accustomed to this type of business.

The company has mapped roughly 300 potentially valuable operators in the stablecoin market since the idea took its current shape this April, held discussions with more than 130 of them and formed a founding cohort of around 30 companies. The pilot was deliberately closed, allowing Plexo to identify the common processes that can work across institutions operating under different regulatory regimes and in different markets before opening the network more broadly.

‘The beauty of the model is that we start with zero integration,’ Mr Titov tells ITKeyMedia. ‘Starting manual is deliberate sequencing: the asset is the standardized compliance file and the audit trail behind it, not the manpower behind the first transactions.’

The timeline has since moved beyond the initial planning stage. Plexo completed an internal end-to-end test transaction on August 12th, with the first test transaction between real financial institutions taking place in the following weeks. APIs were scheduled for later, after the company has established which flows and processes are worth automating.

The Compliance File as a Reusable Asset

For Mr Shprenger, the compliance file is one of the more important pieces of that infrastructure. Plexo doesn’t certify counterparties or tell one institution simply to trust another. Instead, its experts assemble the available KYB and compliance documentation into a standardized package that can be reused in subsequent relationships.

‘Today KYB is performed by a senior specialist with a decade at a European financial regulator, and we can typically return a verdict within 72 hours, plus any follow-up requests,’ Mr Shprenger explains. ‘The point of our process is quality: we check and package the KYB and compliance file into a state that is maximally acceptable for fast onboarding by other institutions, and we standardize it.’

Meanwhile, the current regular process can be considerably slower: A typical document-request cycle between financial institutions takes 7–14 days,. According to Plexo, much of that time gets consumed by people waiting for documents, responding to requests and repeating information that has already been supplied elsewhere.

The startup’s longer-term roadmap is to turn that standardized information layer into a broader compliance relay, adding document storage, communication, and eventually AI-assisted responses to document requests. The idea is that each new review should make the underlying package more reusable rather than restarting the process from scratch.

Plexo is building in a market where regulation is moving almost as quickly as technology. The EU’s MiCA framework has created a clearer regulatory environment for crypto-asset businesses in Europe, while other jurisdictions are developing their own approaches to stablecoin payments and digital assets.

Kenya is one of the markets where Plexo has already got involved in that process. In May, the startup accepted an invitation from the Central Bank of Kenya to participate in an expert workshop focused on developing a regulatory framework for corporate stablecoin payments.

The company is also assembling a team and advisory network with experience on the regulatory side of financial markets. Among its advisors is Matthias Bauer-Langgartner, formerly of the Austrian FMA and the UK’s FCA and now Head of Policy Europe at Chainalysis, while Plexo’s compliance lead spent a decade at a European financial regulator.

Licensing as a Future Layer of Accountability

For Plexo, obtaining licenses is nevertheless part of the longer-term plan even though its current model does not handle customer funds and therefore does not require a license for the activities it currently performs. Mr Titov expects the company to select a market outside Europe for licensing within six months, while the Czech Republic is among the European jurisdictions it is considering.

‘We see how quickly emerging markets are evolving in terms of licensing frameworks, and we have given ourselves the next six months to select a market outside Europe,’ Mr Titov shares. “A license answers [the question of accountability]directly, rather than through ‘trust us.’”

Capital to Accelerate the Network

DEPO Ventures’ investment gives Plexo its first institutional backer and is intended primarily to accelerate product development, additional audits and licensing, communications around the network launch, and the expansion of the founding cohort.

For DEPO Ventures’ partner Michal Ciffra, the opportunity extends beyond cryptocurrency infrastructure. He argues that stablecoins are increasingly being used by conventional businesses for cross-border payments, while the institutions handling those transactions still lack a shared infrastructure for establishing relationships with one another.

‘Stablecoins are no longer just the domain of cryptocurrency enthusiasts. They are becoming an effective alternative for traditional businesses, saving them time and money on cross-border payments,’ the investor notes. ‘Plexo provides this crucial technological bridge, and we see enormous potential in it for modernizing the global financial market.’

He also points to the experience surrounding the two founders, with the company’s broader team and advisors bringing backgrounds from companies including N26, KuCoin, and Chainalysis. For DEPO, that combination of an emerging market need and an experienced team is part of the reason it chose to make Plexo its first institutional investment.

Beyond Stablecoins: A Multipurpose Trust Layer

The founders, however, are thinking beyond stablecoin payments themselves. Mr Titov envisions the compliance and trust layer Plexo is developing as potentially useful wherever financial institutions need to establish relationships and move value between different systems.

‘Success in two years looks like this: the data and trust layer we have built is multipurpose, usable for any interaction between financial companies,’ the CEO states. ‘Cross-border B2B payments, consumer payments, agentic payments, tokenized real-world asset transfers, any kind of rails.’

This is also the reason why the company is reluctant to define itself merely as a payments startup. Stablecoins are the immediate use case because the fragmentation is particularly critical here, but the infrastructure that the founders want to build is designed to survive changes in the underlying assets and payment rails.

‘For us, it does not matter which asset moves or on which rail: what matters is from whom, to whom, and why,’ Mr Titov clarifies. That is what makes the story bigger than payments.’

For now, however, the company is keeping its ambitions grounded in the pilot. The founding cohort is intended to grow to around 30 members actively conducting transactions, with 2026 remaining a closed testing phase and broader network expansion beginning once Plexo has refined the common operating layer across its different markets.

The founders describe this process in terms of the same Tower of Babel metaphor that shaped their original thinking: the financial institutions already exist, the rails already exist and stablecoins can already move value. What Plexo is trying to build is the common language—and eventually the infrastructure—that allows all of them to work together.