Jack Zhang was 34 years previous, three and a half years into operating a startup, and sitting throughout from one in every of the strongest traders in Silicon Valley. Michael Moritz of Sequoia had invited him to his dwelling — a spot with, Zhang recollects, a few flooring and a view straight to the Golden Gate Bridge — to make the case for promoting.
Stripe wished to purchase Airwallex for $1.2 billion. At the time, the Melbourne firm had round $2 million in annualized income. The mathematics 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 2 weeks, stressed, unable to suppose straight. At one level, he stated sure.
Then he flew practically 8,000 miles again dwelling.
“I actually went deep on what motivates me to construct Airwallex,” he stated early this week, talking to this editor from abroad. “I used to be three and a half years into the enterprise. The enterprise was rising 100 occasions in 2018. And I solely simply kind 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. However he says the clearest sign got here from taking a look at 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 in the world as if it had been an area firm.
That call 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 level.
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, residing with a bunch household. When his household’s funds collapsed, he took on 4 jobs to get by a pc science diploma at the College of Melbourne, in accordance to the Australian Monetary Assessment — bartending, washing dishes, working graveyard shifts at a petroleum station, choosing lemons on a farm in the college holidays, which he has known as the hardest job he ever had. He went on to spend years writing buying and selling code in the entrance workplace of an Australian funding financial institution, a job that paid nicely and by no means felt “deeply fulfilling.”
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Earlier than Airwallex, he began roughly 10 companies: {a magazine} at age 14, an actual property improvement firm, import-export operations operating wine and olive oil from Australia to Asia, textiles going the different route, a burger chain.
He was operating a Melbourne espresso store when the thought for Airwallex took form. Whereas 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 implementing OFAC sanctions guidelines, typically bouncing again weeks after they had been despatched. “That pushed me to actually take a look at how correspondent banking works,” Zhang stated, “how SWIFT works, and the way we might construct our personal world cash motion community.”
That’s nonetheless the thought, simply scaled up significantly. Airwallex now holds shut to 90 monetary licenses throughout 50 markets. Zhang estimates Stripe has roughly half that quantity at finest. Getting these licenses has been immensely time consuming — in Japan alone, the course of took seven years. In some rising markets, the firm had to purchase shell corporations whose licenses had been now not being issued by central banks, then rebuild the expertise beneath them totally.
“You possibly can’t actually vibe-code an integration with Mexico’s central financial institution,” Zhang stated. “We now have to have a safe room — you may have to do a biometric scan simply to stroll in to entry the central financial institution integration.”
The purpose of holding these licenses isn’t regulatory window dressing. In Japan, for example, Stripe and Sq. 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. Which means a buyer can subject financial institution accounts, subject playing cards, and spend cash with out it ever leaving the platform.
The international trade economics alone are substantial: a U.S. service provider settling transactions in Australian {dollars} avoids the 2% to 3% conversion payment that processors like Stripe usually cost to transfer a refund into U.S. {dollars} — and may use these native balances to pay native distributors, run payroll, and canopy digital advertising bills, all at interbank charges.
“You don’t actually function like a U.S. firm anymore,” Zhang stated. “You use like an organization with entities round the world, however without having to bodily arrange these entities.”
The gradual construct was intentional, and Zhang has a framework for it that he returns to usually: the “path of maximum resistance.” Each license, each financial institution integration, each native fee rail that Airwallex painstakingly assembled created a layer that makes it tougher to compete towards. “It took us six and a half years to get to $100 million in annual recurring income,” Zhang stated. “However after that, it took simply over three years to get to a billion.”
The aggressive logic, in his telling, comes down to one thing primary about what it means to personal infrastructure versus using another person’s. In case you don’t management the end-to-end fee workflow and one thing goes unsuitable, you may’t entry the underlying knowledge to clarify it to your buyer. You possibly can’t lengthen new merchandise cleanly on prime of another person’s stack. “Constructing on prime of different infrastructure,” he stated, “is merely not scalable.”
For many of its life, Airwallex and Stripe have largely operated in several geographies, promoting to completely different consumers. That’s altering. As Stripe pushes deeper into worldwide markets, and Airwallex makes its first critical strikes into the United States, the overlap is rising.
The client for Airwallex has traditionally been the CFO’s workplace in Australia and Southeast Asia, the place the firm is already well-established — finance administrators, treasury groups — which places it in a distinct gross sales movement than Stripe, whose buyer acquisition has been pushed largely by U.S. builders selecting a default start line for a brand new firm. Greater than 90% of Airwallex clients 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.
Nonetheless, there are challenges that Zhang doesn’t attempt to downplay. The most important could also be that Stripe is Silicon Valley’s golden baby, its privately held shares having minted millionaires throughout the tech trade. One other is the accompanying model hole. Airwallex wants to embed itself in the pondering of engineers and builders — not simply finance groups — in order that founders attain for it instinctively. “Our model is simply not there but,” he stated. “That’s a tougher competitors to win.”
It’s a contest being watched carefully from a wide range of vantage factors. Sequoia backed Airwallex early — although the deal was sourced by Sequoia Capital China, which has since spun out and rebranded as Hongshan — and stays one in every of the 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 traders, he famous, are betting on a big market.
Nonetheless, it brings up the valuation query. Stripe was valued at $159 billion in a February tender provide — up 74% from a yr earlier — after processing $1.9 trillion in whole fee quantity in 2025. Airwallex, assigned an $8 billion valuation in December, is valued at roughly a twentieth of that. However in accordance to Zhang, Stripe’s fee quantity is solely about six occasions Airwallex’s, not 20 occasions. At 85% annual development and projecting $2 billion in income inside the subsequent yr, Airwallex is closing the income hole quicker than the valuation hole would counsel.
Whether or not the market ultimately notices is a distinct query — one which an IPO, which Zhang says is at the very least three to 5 years away, would pressure into the open.
In the meantime, Zhang says he’s centered on longer-horizon targets: one million clients by 2030, $20 billion in annual income, common income per buyer rising from round $12,000 to $13,000 at this time to roughly $20,000. A set of AI-powered autonomous finance merchandise — brokers that don’t simply floor knowledge however truly execute transactions — is rolling out now. The thesis is {that a} decade of economic knowledge 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 tough work is sufficient 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 pals, however they had been pleasant whereas merger talks had been ongoing years in the past. Final yr, Zhang and Collison had been each at Greenoaks Capital’s annual gathering. They didn’t converse.
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