Airwallex at $8B: What Jack Zhang Built and Why It Matters

Most people assume the big fintech stories come out of San Francisco or London. Airwallex is not from either place.

It started in Melbourne. Founded by Jack Zhang — who grew up between China and Australia — it has quietly become one of the most valuable private fintech companies in the world. The latest round values it at $8 billion.

That number puts it firmly in the unicorn tier, but it's not just the valuation that's interesting. It's what the company actually does and who it's going after.

Airwallex is not a consumer app. It's not trying to replace your personal bank account. It builds financial infrastructure for businesses — the pipes that move money across borders, convert currencies in real time, and let companies embed financial products into their own platforms.

That's a different game. And it's a much bigger one.

Here's the short version: Airwallex lets businesses send and receive money internationally without getting destroyed on fees and FX rates.

The cross-border payments product is the core. A company in Spain paying a supplier in Hong Kong shouldn't need to go through three correspondent banks and lose 3% on the exchange. Airwallex cuts that down.

But it goes further than payments. There's a multi-currency business account — so a startup can hold USD, EUR, HKD, and AUD without opening accounts in every country. There's real-time FX. There's embedded finance, which lets other companies plug Airwallex's infrastructure into their own products via a financial API.

This is why comparisons to Stripe keep coming up. Both companies sell to businesses, not consumers. Both are API-first. But Airwallex has built more heavily around cross-border and multi-currency from day one — that's the bet Zhang made, and the APAC market gave him a natural testing ground.

For any company that operates across more than one country, this product suite is genuinely useful. That's a large and growing market.

People ask whether Airwallex competes with Stripe or Wise. The honest answer is: both, partially, and neither completely.

Stripe owns online payments for internet businesses. It's dominant. Going head-to-head with Stripe on domestic card processing would be a losing fight. The comparison is more nuanced than that.

Wise is closer in the cross-border money movement space. But Wise's product is largely consumer and small business focused. Airwallex is pushing harder into enterprise — bigger companies, bigger volumes, B2B transfers at scale.

Then there's Adyen, Checkout.com, PayPal. The payments infrastructure space is crowded. But most of those companies built their core product for a single-market, single-currency world and then tried to bolt on international capabilities later.

Airwallex built international first. That matters when your customer is a SaaS company with users in 40 countries who needs to collect revenue, pay contractors, and manage treasury all at once.

The EU licence and the US expansion suggest Zhang is not interested in staying a regional player.

The investor list is serious. Tencent was an early backer — which makes sense given Airwallex's China-origin story and Asian market positioning. DST Global has been in. Sequoia as well.

The latest round is a Series E at the $8B valuation mark, per Crunchbase.

The Tencent connection is also where some of the controversy lives. In late 2025, a Forbes piece surfaced allegations about a China backdoor from a prominent VC. Airwallex has pushed back on this. But it's the kind of allegation that doesn't disappear quietly, especially as the company eyes an IPO and increased regulatory scrutiny in Western markets.

The fintech regulatory environment is not getting looser. And any company with deep ties to Chinese capital is going to face harder questions in the US and Europe than it would have five years ago.

Zhang has built something real. The question around governance and ownership is separate from the product quality — but it's a question that will follow the company into whatever comes next.

The honest reason Airwallex exists is that banks are bad at this.

A multinational corporation trying to manage treasury across eight currencies using a traditional bank relationship is dealing with slow wire transfers, opaque FX spreads, and account structures built for a world where capital moved slowly. The world's largest banks by assets are enormous — but enormous doesn't mean fast or cheap.

Fintech companies like Airwallex are not competing on brand or trust in the traditional sense. They're competing on price and speed. And for a mid-size business moving $10 million a month internationally, saving 1.5% on FX is not a small number.

Open banking frameworks in Europe and the growth of fintech in Australia have made this easier. But mostly it's just execution. Zhang and his team built the integrations, got the licences, and made the product actually work across jurisdictions.

That's not easy to do. Most companies that try to become global payment infrastructure end up as single-market businesses with international pretensions.

Airwallex got further than most.

The IPO question is real. At $8B, the company is too big to stay private forever. The pressure from early investors — Sequoia, DST, Tencent — to generate liquidity will mount.

But the product roadmap is also still moving. Stablecoins are one area Zhang is watching closely. If a business can hold and transfer USD-denominated stablecoins without touching the traditional correspondent banking system, that's a faster and cheaper rail than anything Airwallex currently runs on. That's not a near-term product — but it's not sci-fi either.

The US expansion matters most right now. North America is the market that will define whether this is a $20B company or one that plateaus at a strong but regional business.

And the enterprise customer push is real. Signing mid-market SaaS companies is good. Signing the Amazons and Spotifys of the world is a different business entirely — and that's where you start competing directly with Adyen and Stripe in ways that become unavoidable.

Zhang built a Melbourne startup into a global payments infrastructure company. That part is already done. The next chapter is harder.