11 Years, $11 Billion, and Then What? | A Conversation with Airwallex's Jack Zhang: In the AI Era, the Next Stop Is $100 Billion

🚥 I love listening to founder stories — the successes, the failures, the dramatic reversals, the ones still searching for answers. I always find something resonant and illuminating in them.

In the first half of this year, Crossing invited many new-generation AI founders, who mostly shared stories of setting out from zero to one, full of ambition. But for the coming stretch, I want to bring in more founders who've already crossed the mountain, to hear them talk about the journey.

➤ This week's guest on Crossing is Kai Wu, Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Airwallex, which just closed a new funding round last month at an $11 billion valuation. He shared with us several pivotal decisions in how this Chinese-founded company, started from Melbourne, grew from zero to $11 billion in 11 years: rejecting Stripe's acquisition offer, gritting through four years of losses to build out a global network first, insisting on hiring locals as managers in every market worldwide.

These decisions struck me because they all ask, in essence, the same question every founder faces: when "money" and "vision," "bet" and "risk" are laid out before you simultaneously — which do you choose?

If you're also working on something with no short-term payoff but long-term conviction, this episode will give you some concrete strength.

Beyond the story, we of course talked plenty about AI. Having entered the decacorn club, Airwallex's advantages now compound with a generational opportunity: AI is pushing global finance toward an inflection point. So in this episode, we focused on how AI is transforming fintech:

Airwallex is supporting large model companies: Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Zhipu AI, DeepSeek, and others. How are new demands like multi-model switching, tiered pricing, peak/off-peak double pricing, and real-time dynamic billing forcing financial infrastructure to evolve?

Could the ten separate financial SaaS tools once needed for spend management, accounting, revenue recognition, reconciliation, and billing be replaced by a single Agent interface?

After ChatGPT Finance's launch, how will the competitive landscape for "financial super-intelligent entry points" evolve?

What are Airwallex's successive AI financial products — Kai, AgentOS, T:0, Airi?

Airwallex has acquired Leapfin and OpenPay, with more acquisitions in progress. What's the core strategic logic driving this active M&A — what key assets are they after?

🎬 Our video podcast will be released simultaneously on Koji's WeChat Channels, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, YouTube, and other platforms.

📒 The transcript will be published on the CrossingCrossing WeChat official account.

🟢 00:42 Lightning round: Age, alma mater, MBTI and zodiac sign, one-sentence intro to Airwallex, and what a CRO actually does

🟢 02:10 Serving Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Zhipu AI, DeepSeek

How do large model companies' needs differ?

Why isn't this something the model companies handle themselves?

🟢 05:02 How a cup of coffee became a global payments network

A single transfer, regardless of size, could incur $20–50 in fees; the founder's name was once flagged because it phonetically matched someone on a sanctions list, repeatedly blocking remittances.

Wise, Revolut and others spotted the opportunity around the same time — what path did Airwallex take to differentiate?

🟢 09:24 Losing money for four years to build the global network first

Focusing only on Southeast Asia might have meant profitability much sooner; Airwallex chose global coverage from Day One.

Many regional payment networks eventually sold to giants like Visa and PayPal — why didn't they?

🟢 13:12 Investors thought this "global bank" vision was crazy

Pure fund transfer was too infrastructure-layer, with limited direct enterprise use; so what strategic decision did Airwallex make?

Multiple product lines could be built in parallel, but each had to be cut to minimum viable scope — what's the first-principles framework for judging "vertical vs. full-stack"?

It wasn't until 2021, its sixth year, that Airwallex truly found PMF for its global banking product.

🟢 22:55 Financial automation, from engineering team to a single ops person

Previously only mid-to-large enterprises could justify building engineering teams for financial automation; AI is making this accessible to SMBs.

Airwallex's AI assistant Kai, built into the Airwallex WebApp, can analyze financial policies, optimize working capital, build expense workflows, and directly troubleshoot why a payment hasn't arrived.

AgentOS then exposes underlying financial capabilities to enterprises' own Agents via CLI, API, and MCP.

About a month after Kai's launch, what early signal did they see?

🟢 27:14 SaaS vs. Agent

Why will ten financial SaaS tools consolidate into a single Agent interface?

Previously five finance staff using ten software suites — what happens next?

Point-solution SaaS tools have siloed data, which becomes a fatal weakness in the AI era: without cross-process data, their AI grows "dumber."

T:0 aims to give companies a mini-CFO from Day Zero; Airi evolves from one-click checkout toward an intelligent wallet for consumers and Agents.

🟢 32:17 Data, talent, traffic: the three cards of financial entry points

What did Airwallex see in acquiring Leapfin and OpenPay?

ChatGPT Finance wants to connect to financial platforms, but platforms must weigh: leverage its massive traffic to serve more customers, or protect their own data and entry point?

As models increasingly become commoditized, at which layer will the financial super-entrance ultimately emerge?

🟢 37:23 Rejecting Stripe's acquisition, rejecting premature monetization

At Series B, Stripe had wanted to acquire Airwallex; the real difficulty wasn't execution, but choosing between money and vision when both were on the table.

In 2018, with revenue near zero, Kai Wu built a financial model projecting path to over a billion in revenue — investors flatly called it "impossible."

Looking back six years later, actual growth diverged from that forecast by only about a quarter and a half. How?

When the market is large enough and the company is positioned, what remains?

🟢 39:31 Beyond $1.3B ARR, competing for the financial super-entrance

Airwallex's ARR is roughly $1.3 billion, growing ~74% annually, with ~70% gross margins; at roughly 8x P/S, Kai Wu considers the $11 billion valuation not high.

Where does that 74% annual growth come from?

Beyond Airwallex, which other companies hold tickets to become the "financial super-intelligent entry point"?

🟢 43:07 Going global, choosing the right locals

What's hardest about globalization? What's the biggest pitfall?

How do you choose which countries/markets to enter first?

What are the different traffic strategies for Asia vs. Europe and the US?

🟢 49:18 From $11 billion to $100 billion

Airwallex currently serves over 200,000 customers; the next threshold is reaching one million.

The product must also evolve from helping finance staff complete tasks, toward Intelligent Finance that proactively drives efficiency.

How do you grow into a $100 billion company?

Subscribe to Crossing: 🚦 We track the industry shifts and new entrepreneurial opportunities brought by the new wave of AI technology.

🚦 Crossing is Steve Jobs's metaphor for Apple — standing at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, where great products are born. AI is transforming every industry; we seek out, interview, and bring together new-generation AI founders and active builders in the AI era, exploring and embracing new changes and new possibilities alongside them.

👦🏻 Host Koji: I founded Crossing, launched AI Hacker House — a community space for new-generation AI founders — and serve as Venture Partner at ZhenFund. I believe technology, especially AI, represents the greatest value-creation opportunity of our generation. Koji on Jike, Koji's website

View this episode's transcript on Xiaoyuzhou