Borderless financial infrastructure for businesses that operate globally
HQ: Melbourne, Australia; co-headquartered in San Francisco, CA and Singapore | Founded: 2015 | Employees: 2,300+ across 27 offices | Stage: Series H; $11B valuation (June 2026); $1.3B annualized revenue and profitable on an operating basis, according to the company | Website: https://www.airwallex.com
Airwallex was founded in Melbourne in 2015 by Jack Zhang, Lucy Liu, Max Li, Xijing Dai and Ki-Lok Wong. The founding team came from banking and technology and had lived the problem firsthand: as small exporters they were quoted currency conversion fees and delays that made no sense for a software business selling globally. Their answer was to build a licensed, software-first alternative to correspondent banking, starting with foreign exchange and international payments, then adding local accounts and collection in major markets. The company expanded from Australia into Asia, Europe and North America, and now holds 85+ licences across those regions.
The product set has widened from payments into something closer to a business bank. Airwallex offers global accounts with local details in multiple currencies, payment acceptance for online merchants, FX and transfers, corporate cards, spend management, billing and invoicing, and embedded finance APIs that let platforms offer these products to their own customers. That breadth is deliberate: the company says more than 90% of its revenue comes from customers using more than one product, which raises revenue per customer and makes the relationship stickier than a pure payments or FX provider.
The growth numbers have been exceptional. Airwallex reported $720M of annualized revenue in March 2025, crossed $1B by October 2025, and reached $1.3B in March 2026, up 74% year over year. Annualized transaction volume more than doubled to $287B. The company serves more than 676,000 businesses directly or through platform customers, ranging from startups to public enterprises, and it operates 27 offices with more than 2,300 employees. It established San Francisco as a co-headquarters alongside Singapore in December 2025, a signal that North America and the agentic-commerce ecosystem are now central to its strategy.
The funding path reflects both execution and the market's reappraisal of fintech. Airwallex reached a $1B valuation at its Series C in 2019, $5.5B in 2021, and $5.6B in 2022 before the downturn. It raised $300M at $6.2B in May 2025, $330M at $8B in December 2025 and $320M at $11B in June 2026. Total raised is roughly $1.8B-$1.9B. The Series H was led by Addition, an existing investor, and included a mix of growth investors, sovereign funds and strategic participants such as Amex Ventures.
The next chapter is AI-native finance. Airwallex argues that its licences, local network integrations and settlement rails are exactly the infrastructure that autonomous finance and agentic commerce require, and it is building two products on top: T:0, an AI finance department that automates accounting, tax, compliance and reporting, and Airi, a consumer wallet for agent payments with delegated spending limits and permission controls. It has also launched an Agentic Commerce Suite for merchants. The bet is that as AI agents begin to transact, the winner will be the company that owns both the regulated rails and the workflow layer, not the one with the best chat interface.
Airwallex has quietly become one of the most important pieces of infrastructure in global commerce. It started in 2015 with a narrow insight: cross-border payments were slow and expensive because businesses depended on a chain of correspondent banks, and a software company that owned its own licences and local rails could do it faster and cheaper. Eleven years later it holds 85+ licences, serves more than 676,000 businesses, and moves $287B of annualized transaction volume. In March 2026 it reported $1.3B of annualized revenue, up 74% year over year, with more than 90% of that revenue coming from customers who use more than one Airwallex product.
The valuation trajectory tells the story of the post-2023 recovery in fintech. Airwallex was worth $5.6B in 2022, took a modest reset to $6.2B in May 2025, then re-rated to $8B in December 2025 and $11B in June 2026 as revenue crossed $1B and then $1.3B. The Series H was led by returning investor Addition, with Baillie Gifford, QED, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia, Haun Ventures, Amex Ventures and others participating. Unlike many fintechs that grew by subsidizing transactions, Airwallex has paired growth with improving unit economics and says it is profitable on an operating basis.
The product story is the more interesting one. Airwallex is no longer just a payments company: it offers global accounts, local collection, FX, corporate cards, spend management, billing and embedded finance, and it sells those products to other platforms through APIs. That multi-product attach rate is the core of its economics — over 90% of revenue comes from multi-product customers — and it is why the company is positioning itself as an AI-native financial operating system rather than a cheaper way to send money abroad. T:0, launched in September 2026, automates bookkeeping, forecasting, tax, compliance and reporting for startups; Airi is a wallet for agentic commerce with delegated payments, spend limits and permission controls.
The risks are the mirror image of its strengths. Airwallex operates in a licensing-heavy, capital-intensive business across dozens of regulators, and every new market adds compliance cost and AML exposure. FX revenue is sensitive to spreads and volatility, and the company competes with Wise on transparency, Revolut and Mercury on breadth, Stripe and Adyen on merchant acquiring, and local banks on trust. Its agentic-commerce and AI-finance bets are early and unproven, and the $11B mark assumes it can keep growing revenue at 50%+ while expanding margins. The bull case is that owning licences, local rails and the finance workflow creates a durable toll road for global business; the bear case is that payments is a scale game where incumbents can match features and undercut on price.
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