The numbers come first. Airwallex closed a $320 million Series H funding round in late June, led by Addition and joined by Baillie Gifford, T. Rowe Price, Amex Ventures, and Washington University in St. Louis. The round pegged the company's valuation at $11 billion — up sharply from the $8 billion it commanded in December, when it raised $330 million in a prior Addition-led round.
That back-to-back fundraising pace is deliberate. 'Our fundraising has been quite rapid over the past two years,' president Lucy Liu told Fortune, describing the latest round as the product of 'ongoing conversations' with existing investors. 'We have a lot ahead of us, and we just want to be able to have enough capital to fast-charge our plans.'
CEO Jack Zhang framed the capital deployment in equally ambitious terms, saying the money would help Airwallex 'move faster into Airwallex's next chapter: autonomous finance, agentic commerce, and the infrastructure to power both.'
From payments rails to AI-driven finance. Airwallex was founded in Melbourne over a decade ago after co-founders Zhang and Max Li encountered friction running a coffee shop that imported goods from overseas. The platform now serves over 675,000 businesses and reports more than $1 billion in annualized run rate revenue. Liu declined to provide specific profitability figures but said the company is 'EBITDA positive' with a 'healthy gross margin.'
Two new AI products anchor the next chapter. T:0 is an automated bookkeeping system designed to run a company's entire financial department autonomously. Liu compared it to Tesla's assisted driving: 'You still have someone in the driver's seat, but the car really drives itself.' The second product, Ari, is an agentic consumer wallet built for one-click checkout.
Geographic expansion is accelerating. Airwallex is pushing into the U.S., South Korea, Mexico, and Brazil. In Mexico, it acquired a payments license through the purchase of MexPago. In Brazil, client demand pulled the company in — and cross-border traffic flows in both directions. 'Local businesses are all looking away to expand globally, and easier ways to operate globally,' Liu said.
The U.S. push is particularly pointed. Zhang told Fortune in November that the pitch to American companies is a single platform covering banking, payments, spend, and treasury management across markets including Australia, Singapore, the U.K., and Canada.
The IPO question. Liu was direct: it is 'not the best time' for a public offering. That caution is not unique to Airwallex — Dublin-based Stripe, the payments industry's largest private player, has similarly stayed off public markets. The broader trend is toward later-stage private rounds. Liu noted that investors 'want to see a track record before they deploy capital,' explaining the industry-wide drift toward Series G, H, and beyond. Databricks, for comparison, is assembling investors for a Series M at a reported $188 billion valuation.
Asian venture capital is recovering — VC-backed companies across Asia raised $50.8 billion in the second quarter, the strongest showing since Q4 2021, according to KPMG — but the region's total remains barely a third of the $145 billion U.S. startups raised in the same period.
CEO Times take. Airwallex's trajectory is a clean case study in what free-enterprise capital allocation looks like when it works: a problem identified in a small business, a product built to solve it at scale, and private investors willing to fund the next phase without a government backstop in sight. The $11 billion valuation reflects real revenue and real margins, not a subsidy story. The reluctance to go public is rational discipline, not weakness — the market rewards companies that list on their own terms, not the calendar's. When Airwallex does eventually ring the bell, the track record will already be written.
