\n<\/p>\n
Jack Zhang was 34 years old, three and a half years into running a startup, and sitting across from one of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley. Michael Moritz of Sequoia had invited him to his home \u2014 a place with, Zhang recalls, a couple of floors and a view straight to the Golden Gate Bridge \u2014 to make the case for selling.<\/p>\n
Stripe wanted to buy Airwallex for $1.2 billion. At the time, the Melbourne company had around $2 million in annualized revenue. The math was almost pretty irresistable: a revenue multiple somewhere near 600 times. Patrick Collison, Moritz argued, was a generational founder. The deal would \u201ccompound\u201d into something extraordinary. Zhang listened. He walked around San Francisco for two weeks, restless, unable to think straight. At one point, he said yes.<\/p>\n
Then he flew nearly 8,000 miles back home.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really went deep on what motivates me to build Airwallex,\u201d he said early this week, speaking to this editor from overseas. \u201cI was three and a half years into the business. The business was growing 100 times in 2018. And I only just sort of tasted what it [was like] to be an entrepreneur. And that\u2019s what I\u2019d been dreaming about.\u201d<\/p>\n
Two of his three co-founders had voted against the deal, which helped. But he says the clearest signal came from looking at the whiteboard back in his office. The vision was still there, unfinished: to build the financial infrastructure that lets any business operate anywhere in the world as if it were a local company.<\/p>\n
That decision is looking increasingly prescient. Airwallex now claims more than $1.3 billion in annualized revenue and is growing at 85% year-over-year. It processes approaching $300 billion in annualized transaction volume. None of it has come easily \u2014 and Zhang argues that\u2019s precisely the point.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a conviction that runs a lot deeper than business strategy. Zhang grew up in Qingdao, a port city in northeastern China, and moved to Melbourne at 15 without his parents, barely speaking English, living with a host family. When his family\u2019s finances collapsed, he took on four jobs to get through a computer science degree at the University of Melbourne, according to the Australian Financial Review \u2014 bartending, washing dishes, working graveyard shifts at a petrol station, picking lemons on a farm in the school holidays, which he has called the hardest job he ever had. He went on to spend years writing trading code in the front office of an Australian investment bank, a job that paid well and never felt \u201cdeeply fulfilling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Techcrunch event<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> Before Airwallex, he started roughly 10 businesses: a magazine at age 14, a real estate development company, import-export operations running wine and olive oil from Australia to Asia, textiles going the other direction, a burger chain.<\/p>\n He was running a Melbourne coffee shop when the idea for Airwallex took shape. While trying to pay coffee bean suppliers in Brazil, Indonesia, and Guatemala, his co-founder Max Li kept watching payments disappear into correspondent banking systems \u2014 flagged and frozen by American intermediary banks enforcing OFAC sanctions rules, sometimes bouncing back weeks after they were sent. \u201cThat pushed me to really look at how correspondent banking works,\u201d Zhang said, \u201chow SWIFT works, and how we could build our own global money movement network.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s still the idea, just scaled up considerably. Airwallex now holds close to 90 financial licenses across 50 markets. Zhang estimates Stripe has roughly half that number at best. Getting those licenses has been immensely time consuming \u2014 in Japan alone, the process took seven years. In some emerging markets, the company had to acquire shell companies whose licenses were no longer being issued by central banks, then rebuild the technology underneath them entirely.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t really vibe-code an integration with Mexico\u2019s central bank,\u201d Zhang said. \u201cWe have to have a secure room \u2014 you have to do a biometric scan just to walk in to access the central bank integration.\u201d<\/p>\n The point of holding these licenses isn\u2019t regulatory window dressing. In Japan, for instance, Stripe and Square can process payments, but they\u2019re required to immediately transfer funds out to the merchant\u2019s bank account. Airwallex, with its fund transfer operator license, can hold those funds inside its ecosystem. That means a customer can issue bank accounts, issue cards, and spend money without it ever leaving the platform. <\/p>\n The foreign exchange economics alone are substantial: a U.S. merchant settling transactions in Australian dollars avoids the 2% to 3% conversion fee that processors like Stripe typically charge to move money back into U.S. dollars \u2014 and can use those local balances to pay local vendors, run payroll, and cover digital marketing expenses, all at interbank rates.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t really operate like a U.S. company anymore,\u201d Zhang said. \u201cYou operate like a company with entities around the world, but without needing to physically set up those entities.\u201d<\/p>\n The slow build was intentional, and Zhang has a framework for it that he returns to often: the \u201cpath of maximum resistance<\/a>.\u201d Every license, every bank integration, every local payment rail that Airwallex painstakingly assembled created a layer that makes it harder to compete against. \u201cIt took us six and a half years to get to $100 million in annual recurring revenue,\u201d Zhang said. \u201cBut after that, it took just over three years to get to a billion.\u201d<\/p>\n The competitive logic, in his telling, comes down to something basic about what it means to own infrastructure versus riding someone else\u2019s. If you don\u2019t control the end-to-end payment workflow and something goes wrong, you can\u2019t access the underlying data to explain it to your customer. You can\u2019t extend new products cleanly on top of someone else\u2019s stack. \u201cBuilding on top of other infrastructure,\u201d he said, \u201cis simply not scalable.\u201d<\/p>\n For most of its life, Airwallex and Stripe have mostly operated in different geographies, selling to different buyers. That\u2019s changing. As Stripe pushes deeper into international markets, and Airwallex makes its first serious moves into the United States, the overlap is growing.<\/p>\n The buyer for Airwallex has historically been the CFO\u2019s office in Australia and Southeast Asia, where the company is already well-established \u2014 finance directors, treasury teams \u2014 which puts it in a different sales motion than Stripe, whose customer acquisition has been driven largely by U.S. developers choosing a default starting point for a new company. More than 90% of Airwallex customers land first on a business account product, and payments and spend management follow from there. Over half are using multiple products, says Zhang.<\/p>\n Still, there are challenges that Zhang doesn\u2019t try to downplay. The biggest may be that Stripe is Silicon Valley\u2019s golden child, its privately held shares having minted millionaires across the tech industry. Another is the accompanying brand gap. Airwallex needs to embed itself in the thinking of engineers and developers \u2014 not just finance teams \u2014 so that founders reach for it instinctively. \u201cOur brand is just not there yet,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s a harder competition to win.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a competition being watched closely from a variety of vantage points. Sequoia backed Airwallex early \u2014 though the deal was sourced through Sequoia Capital China, which has since spun out and rebranded as Hongshan \u2014 and remains one of the company\u2019s largest shareholders. The investment firm Greenoaks Capital holds stakes in both companies, too. Zhang shrugged off any suggestion of awkwardness around those overlapping cap tables. The investors, he noted, are betting on a large market.<\/p>\n Still, it brings up the valuation question. Stripe was valued at $159 billion<\/a> in a February tender offer \u2014 up 74% from a year earlier \u2014 after processing $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025. Airwallex, assigned an $8 billion<\/a> valuation in December, is valued at roughly a twentieth of that. But according to Zhang, Stripe\u2019s payment volume is only about six times Airwallex\u2019s, not 20 times. At 85% annual growth and projecting $2 billion in revenue within the next year, Airwallex is closing the revenue gap faster than the valuation gap would suggest.<\/p>\n Whether the market eventually notices is a different question \u2014 one that an IPO, which Zhang says is at least three to five years away, would force into the open.<\/p>\n In the meantime, Zhang says he\u2019s focused on longer-horizon targets: a million customers by 2030, $20 billion in annual revenue, average revenue per customer growing from around $12,000 to $13,000 today to roughly $20,000. A suite of AI-powered autonomous finance products \u2014 agents that don\u2019t just surface data but actually execute transactions \u2014 is rolling out now. The thesis is that a decade of financial data across the entire corporate finance stack, from revenue collection to treasury management to vendor payments and expenses, has created a training set that no competitor can replicate overnight, he suggests.<\/p>\n Now to see if all that hard work is enough to eat into Stripe\u2019s market share. For now, the competition seems to be playing out at a distance. Zhang and Collison were never friends, but they were friendly while merger talks were ongoing years ago. Last year, Zhang and Collison were both at Greenoaks Capital\u2019s annual gathering. They didn\u2019t speak.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|<\/span>
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n