Jack Zhang was 34 years previous, three and a half years into operating a startup, and sitting throughout from probably the most highly effective buyers in Silicon Valley. Michael Moritz of Sequoia had invited him to his house — a spot with, Zhang remembers, a few flooring and a view straight to the Golden Gate Bridge — to make the case for promoting.
Stripe needed to purchase Airwallex for $1.2 billion. At the time, the Melbourne firm had round $2 million in annualized income. The math was virtually fairly irresistable: a income a number of someplace close to 600 occasions. Patrick Collison, Moritz argued, was a generational founder. The deal would “compound” into one thing extraordinary. Zhang listened. He walked round San Francisco for two weeks, stressed, unable to assume straight. At one level, he stated sure.
Then he flew almost 8,000 miles again house.
“I really went deep on what motivates me to build Airwallex,” he stated early this week, talking to this editor from abroad. “I 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’s what I’d been dreaming about.”
Two of his three co-founders had voted towards the deal, which helped. But he says the clearest sign got here from trying on the whiteboard again in his workplace. The imaginative and prescient was nonetheless there, unfinished: to construct the monetary infrastructure that lets any enterprise function wherever on this planet as if it had been a neighborhood firm.
That choice is trying more and more prescient. Airwallex now claims greater than $1.3 billion in annualized income and is rising at 85% year-over-year. It processes approaching $300 billion in annualized transaction quantity. None of it has come simply — and Zhang argues that’s exactly the purpose.
It’s a conviction that runs loads deeper than enterprise technique. Zhang grew up in Qingdao, a port metropolis in northeastern China, and moved to Melbourne at 15 with out his mother and father, barely talking English, dwelling with a bunch household. When his household’s funds collapsed, he took on 4 jobs to get via a pc science diploma on the University of Melbourne, in accordance with the Australian Financial Review — bartending, washing dishes, working graveyard shifts at a petroleum station, selecting lemons on a farm within the faculty holidays, which he has known as the toughest job he ever had. He went on to spend years writing buying and selling code within the entrance workplace of an Australian funding financial institution, a job that paid effectively and by no means felt “deeply fulfilling.”
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Before Airwallex, he began roughly 10 companies: {a magazine} at age 14, an actual property growth firm, import-export operations operating wine and olive oil from Australia to Asia, textiles going the other path, a burger chain.
He was operating a Melbourne espresso store when the concept for Airwallex took form. While attempting to pay espresso bean suppliers in Brazil, Indonesia, and Guatemala, his co-founder Max Li stored watching funds disappear into correspondent banking methods — flagged and frozen by American middleman banks imposing OFAC sanctions guidelines, generally bouncing again weeks after they had been despatched. “That pushed me to really look at how correspondent banking works,” Zhang stated, “how SWIFT works, and how we could build our own global money movement network.”
That’s nonetheless the concept, simply scaled up significantly. Airwallex now holds close to 90 monetary licenses throughout 50 markets. Zhang estimates Stripe has roughly half that quantity at greatest. Getting these licenses has been immensely time consuming — in Japan alone, the method took seven years. In some rising markets, the corporate needed to purchase shell corporations whose licenses had been now not being issued by central banks, then rebuild the know-how beneath them completely.
“You can’t really vibe-code an integration with Mexico’s central bank,” Zhang stated. “We have to have a secure room — you have to do a biometric scan just to walk in to access the central bank integration.”
The level of holding these licenses isn’t regulatory window dressing. In Japan, for occasion, Stripe and Square can course of funds, however they’re required to instantly switch funds out to the service provider’s checking account. Airwallex, with its fund switch operator license, can maintain these funds inside its ecosystem. That means a buyer can challenge financial institution accounts, challenge playing cards, and spend cash with out it ever leaving the platform.
The international alternate economics alone are substantial: a U.S. service provider settling transactions in Australian {dollars} avoids the two% to three% conversion price that processors like Stripe sometimes cost to maneuver a reimbursement into U.S. {dollars} — and can use these native balances to pay native distributors, run payroll, and cowl digital advertising bills, all at interbank charges.
“You don’t really operate like a U.S. company anymore,” Zhang stated. “You operate like a company with entities around the world, but without needing to physically set up those entities.”
The gradual construct was intentional, and Zhang has a framework for it that he returns to typically: the “path of maximum resistance.” Every license, each financial institution integration, each native fee rail that Airwallex painstakingly assembled created a layer that makes it more durable to compete towards. “It took us six and a half years to get to $100 million in annual recurring revenue,” Zhang stated. “But after that, it took just over three years to get to a billion.”
The aggressive logic, in his telling, comes right down to one thing fundamental about what it means to personal infrastructure versus using another person’s. If you don’t management the end-to-end fee workflow and one thing goes fallacious, you’ll be able to’t entry the underlying information to elucidate it to your buyer. You can’t lengthen new merchandise cleanly on high of another person’s stack. “Building on top of other infrastructure,” he stated, “is simply not scalable.”
For most of its life, Airwallex and Stripe have largely operated in numerous geographies, promoting to totally different consumers. That’s altering. As Stripe pushes deeper into worldwide markets, and Airwallex makes its first severe strikes into the United States, the overlap is rising.
The purchaser for Airwallex has traditionally been the CFO’s workplace in Australia and Southeast Asia, the place the corporate is already well-established — finance administrators, treasury groups — which places it in a special gross sales movement than Stripe, whose buyer acquisition has been pushed largely by U.S. builders selecting a default place to begin for a brand new firm. More than 90% of Airwallex prospects land first on a enterprise account product, and funds and spend administration observe from there. Over half are utilizing a number of merchandise, says Zhang.
Still, there are challenges that Zhang doesn’t attempt to downplay. The greatest could also be that Stripe is Silicon Valley’s golden little one, its privately held shares having minted millionaires throughout the tech business. Another is the accompanying model hole. Airwallex must embed itself within the considering of engineers and builders — not simply finance groups — in order that founders attain for it instinctively. “Our brand is just not there yet,” he stated. “That’s a harder competition to win.”
It’s a contest being watched intently from quite a lot of vantage factors. Sequoia backed Airwallex early — although the deal was sourced via Sequoia Capital China, which has since spun out and rebranded as Hongshan — and stays one of many firm’s largest shareholders. The funding agency Greenoaks Capital holds stakes in each corporations, too. Zhang shrugged off any suggestion of awkwardness round these overlapping cap tables. The buyers, he famous, are betting on a big market.
Still, it brings up the valuation query. Stripe was valued at $159 billion in a February tender supply — up 74% from a yr earlier — after processing $1.9 trillion in complete fee quantity in 2025. Airwallex, assigned an $8 billion valuation in December, is valued at roughly a twentieth of that. But in accordance with Zhang, Stripe’s fee quantity is just about six occasions Airwallex’s, not 20 occasions. At 85% annual development and projecting $2 billion in income throughout the subsequent yr, Airwallex is closing the income hole quicker than the valuation hole would recommend.
Whether the market ultimately notices is a special query — one which an IPO, which Zhang says is a minimum of three to 5 years away, would pressure into the open.
In the meantime, Zhang says he’s targeted on longer-horizon targets: one million prospects by 2030, $20 billion in annual income, common income per buyer rising from round $12,000 to $13,000 at present to roughly $20,000. A set of AI-powered autonomous finance merchandise — brokers that don’t simply floor information however truly execute transactions — is rolling out now. The thesis is {that a} decade of economic information throughout the complete company finance stack, from income assortment to treasury administration to vendor funds and bills, has created a coaching set that no competitor can replicate in a single day, he suggests.
Now to see if all that onerous work is enough to eat into Stripe’s market share. For now, the competitors appears to be taking part in out at a distance. Zhang and Collison had been by no means mates, however they had been pleasant whereas merger talks had been ongoing years in the past. Last yr, Zhang and Collison had been each at Greenoaks Capital’s annual gathering. .