Exclusive | Airwallex Raises $300 Million: AI Disrupting Banking

"A decade in the life of a global fintech company." By Qian Ren

Edited by Zhiyan Chen

Anyong Waves has learned exclusively that Airwallex, the global cross-border payments and financial platform, recently completed a $300 million Series F round. Investors include VC firms Square Peg, DST Global, Blackbird, Airtree, and Salesforce Ventures, along with several pension funds; Visa Ventures participated as a strategic investor.

Sources say $150 million of this round consisted of secondary share transfers, at a post-money valuation of $6.2 billion. Airwallex's previous funding round dates back to 2022 — when investors including Square Peg, Hongshan, and Lone Pine Capital injected $100 million at a $5.6 billion valuation. That means this round represents a modest uptick.

Against the backdrop of significant valuation corrections in global primary markets in recent years, and the objective reality that fintech companies have been "marginalized" by domestic Chinese institutions, Airwallex Chief Revenue Officer Kai Wu told Anyong Waves that maintaining its current valuation level was an "active choice."

Compared to the peak fundraising environment of 2021, investors this year are clearly more focused on product moats, long-term competitive advantages, and the global markets that products can unlock. "Being able to answer and clearly validate that the company's market growth will be sustainable going forward — that's the prerequisite for getting investors to buy in," he said.

Wu called the $6.2 billion valuation "completely unwatered." "At least in the medium term, our average growth rate won't fall below 50% over the next five years."

Judging by actual performance data since 2021, Airwallex's results have indeed continued to climb: as of March 2025, annualized revenue exceeded $720 million, up 90% year-over-year; global annualized transaction payment volume surpassed $130 billion, compared to just $50 billion in 2022.

Airwallex now holds payment licenses and permits in over 60 countries and regions, efficiently moving money for 150,000 businesses across more than 150 countries. Ninety-five percent of transactions complete within hours or the same day — with 68% processed in real time — and its customer base nearly doubles every year.

Among global peers, Airwallex is one of the fintech companies with the most payment licenses and permits, having secured authorization in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, mainland China, Japan, New Zealand, the UK, Europe, the US, Canada, Malaysia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil. From solving simple cross-border collection problems to architecting a global payments network, this company — founded in 2015 by four Australian-Chinese entrepreneurs — is redefining how money moves around the world.

Airwallex founding team (from left): Xijing Dai, Jack Zhang, Lucy Liu, Max Li | Image source: Airwallex official website

Regarding widespread rumors of a 2026 IPO, Wu revealed that this may not necessarily be the final round before going public. "2026 is just when we hope to be IPO-ready in terms of both internal growth and governance, but there's no definitive timeline for listing."

Part 01

New Variables Supporting the Valuation

Airwallex's current round comes amid two new variables.

The shift from serving "Chinese companies going global" to serving "local enterprises going global worldwide" represents one of the most significant changes in Airwallex's business model over the past four years, signaling a higher degree of globalization. Initially, Airwallex primarily served Chinese industries with natural cross-border needs — cross-border e-commerce players like SHEIN, SaaS companies, and travel firms — before expanding to local businesses going global in other countries.

In 2020, Greater China accounted for over 80% of revenue; now Europe and the Americas represent 30%, while the entire Asia-Pacific region (including Australia, Southeast Asia, Japan, and Korea outside mainland China) accounts for 70%, with mainland China and Hong Kong making up less than 50%. "We didn't deliberately de-emphasize the China market — we had to open up new growth corridors overseas," Wu said.

This also marks the true milestone of Airwallex becoming a global company: its gross profit compound growth rate in both the Americas and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) regions has exceeded 250%.

The second variable is the expansion of its product suite. In 2017, Airwallex built a global money movement network, creating multi-currency accounts for managing global banking, foreign exchange, and international transfers. Starting in 2020, products extended upstream and downstream along the capital chain, expanding into card-issuing products. For example, its "Spend" product provides customers with a single platform to manage all types of corporate expenses across their global operations. Notably, Airwallex was Visa's earliest fintech card issuer partner in Asia-Pacific; their jointly launched Airwallex Visa Card later accounted for nearly 30% of Airwallex's total revenue.

Airwallex grew up alongside the globalization wave of the past decade. It is not simply a payments tool, but rather integrates fragmented global financial resources through technology. Once it secures a local license, it can rapidly replicate its global products into that market while plugging into local banking and clearing networks.

Airwallex is often called "the AWS of finance." AWS's strength lies in transforming complex IT infrastructure into on-demand cloud services. Airwallex's thinking is similar — breaking cross-border financial capabilities into standardized modules: payment acceptance, accounts, FX, card issuance, and more, which businesses can assemble like Lego bricks based on their needs.

Take global payment acceptance as an example. Airwallex supports 160+ payment methods worldwide, helping businesses significantly improve conversion rates, while allowing them to choose settlement currencies and save substantially on foreign exchange costs. Currently, all other major global payment acceptance players are Western companies — payment giants like Stripe and Adyen, with none originating from the Asia-Pacific region. Stripe takes this to the extreme: as an American company, its employees cannot even bring laptops into Greater China; if a computer is powered on in Hong Kong, it triggers an alarm and becomes unusable. Stripe serves Chinese clients entirely through its Singapore hub.

Because traditional Western payment institutions lag in serving Asia-Pacific businesses — failing to understand local needs and offering ill-fitting products — Chinese merchants encounter bottlenecks at the payment stage, sometimes even hindering their global expansion.

Addressing this supply-demand imbalance overseas has thus become key to Airwallex's recent breakout performance. Compared to Western peers, its differentiation lies in its deep understanding of Asia-Pacific clients and its responsiveness to their needs.

For instance, during the recent tariff crisis, some of Airwallex's capabilities proved valuable: sneaker marketplace GOAT used Airwallex's rate lock service to fix future exchange rates, protecting margins from violent currency swings triggered by tariffs; British beauty device brand CurrentBody used the Scheduled Conversion feature to plan foreign exchange timing in advance, completing key currency conversions before policy implementation.

"Future global enterprises should have finance teams as agile as their tech teams," Wu believes. In a global cross-border payments market worth $150 trillion, Airwallex has only scratched the surface. Its goal is to become the "financial operating system" for local businesses going global — making money flow as seamless, real-time, and intelligent as data.

Part 02

AI Could Disrupt the Future of Banking

At its core, Airwallex's competitors are not other fintech companies, but major banks — they have deeper roots, but the current market is fragmented enough that no single player can dominate.

AI may offer a path to leapfrog them. Wu told Anyong Waves that compared to banks, Airwallex has two advantages in AI: first, the integration, richness, and processing capability of its data; second, differences in regulatory scope and internal compliance review frameworks.

From Airwallex's perspective, AI's strength lies in extracting value from complex information. For example, Airwallex uses large language models (LLMs) to understand customers and determine available financial services during account opening; with generative AI, its KYC (know your customer) tools improve accuracy and contextual awareness. When scanning customer websites, the model can better distinguish whether a merchant sells "champagne-colored" clothing or actual champagne, smartphone accessories or illegally sold smartphones. This tool has reduced false positives in account opening by 50% and increased account openings without human review by 20%.

Airwallex possesses financial operations frameworks spanning account opening, customer support, spend management, and reconciliation — these form the foundation for deploying AI agents across multiple domains. "This means we can proceed step by step. We have a broad financial product suite, so we have the ability to combine financial APIs and AI agents, easily enabling true financial AI agents," Wu explained. In the cloud era, people used SaaS tools to access enterprise services; in the AI era, these SaaS functions need to become tool libraries that AI agents can use, with enterprise services gradually delivered through AI agents.

Within financial operations teams, ensuring data accuracy is essential. Today, enormous time is spent on reconciliation and verifying money flows; AI can naturally reduce much manual work, but "correctness" remains core. A feedback mechanism between humans and machines can quickly identify where AI creates the most value and where improvements are needed.

Meanwhile, Airwallex also views AI as a key lever for scalable growth. When evaluating solutions, it focuses on three dimensions: technical fit (such as API integration with existing systems), transformative efficiency (whether it delivers tenfold or greater efficiency gains), and user experience (internal employee adoption, customer interaction satisfaction, etc.).

In other words, Airwallex's ideal blueprint is to advance an entirely new business category: "AI Agentic Finance" — no longer limited to providing financial tools for humans, but building artificial intelligence that can directly replace or assist CFOs. Take an accounts payable AI agent: it would perform traditional finance functions like vendor management, spend approval, and bill payment just as a human would.

Image source | Airwallex official website

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