AIRWALLEX

Jack Zhang was running an international coffee import business in Melbourne in 2014. Moving money across Asia to pay suppliers was painful — fees were opaque, transfers took days, and the FX rates were terrible.

He met Max Li, Lucy Liu, and Xijing Dai — all with finance and technology backgrounds — and they started building a fix. The initial ambition was simply to make cross-border payments cheaper for Australian businesses trading with Asia.

They entered an Alibaba-sponsored startup competition in 2015, won, and used the resulting attention to attract their first investors. Sequoia China and Tencent came in early.

By 2018 they had raised $80 million. By 2021, the valuation hit $4 billion.

Airwallex is B2B — it has companies as customers, not consumers. Those companies use Airwallex to pay overseas suppliers, receive international payments, issue corporate cards in local currencies, and manage multi-currency accounts.

Revenue comes from foreign exchange spread and service fees. Because the clients are businesses, transactions are typically large — it is not people sending $200 to family, it is companies moving $50,000 to a supplier in Vietnam.

That scale means the FX margin on each transaction generates real revenue. They have expanded into issuing financial accounts and cards, adding further revenue streams on top of the core payments layer.

The Global Business Account lets companies hold, receive, and send money in 60+ currencies without traditional banking friction. The FX and International Payments product processes cross-border transfers at rates close to the interbank rate.

The Airwallex API allows businesses to embed payment infrastructure into their own products — this is the embedded finance layer most fintechs never build. Corporate Cards issue Visa cards in local currencies for expense management.

The Borderless Card is the product for business travellers and remote teams managing expenses across currencies.

Airwallex grew by targeting a customer segment that banks had genuinely ignored: mid-market businesses doing cross-border commerce. Too small for corporate banking solutions, too complex for consumer fintech.

Airwallex positioned itself as the API-first answer — developers at companies could integrate Airwallex directly into their own software. This embedded finance strategy meant Airwallex was being chosen by engineers, not just executives, which creates stickier adoption.

They expanded from Australia into Asia, then Europe, then the US, following trade corridors that their customers needed covered.

Regulatory complexity across multiple jurisdictions is the constant battle. Every country requires a different licence, different compliance structure, different capital requirements.

Airwallex holds licences in the US, UK, EU, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and others — obtaining and maintaining them is expensive and slow. Then there is the competitive pressure: Stripe and Wise are both moving into B2B cross-border payments, and they have significantly more brand recognition globally.

Airwallex has to convince businesses to choose an Australian company over names they already know.

Airwallex assembled a genuinely impressive investor list. Tencent and Sequoia China invested early, anchoring the Asia-Pacific thesis.

DST Global — the firm behind Facebook, Spotify, and Alibaba — joined in the Series C. Salesforce Ventures took a strategic stake.

Lone Pine Capital and ANZ Bank's venture arm participated in later rounds. The investor mix spans Asia, the US, and Australia, which reflects Airwallex's actual geographic footprint rather than a single regional bet.