Jack Zhang was 34 years old and had been running a startup for three and a half years when he sat across from one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful investors. Sequoia’s Michael Moritz invited him to his home (which was several stories high and had a direct view of the Golden Gate Bridge, Zhang recalls) to make the case for the sale.
Stripe wanted to acquire Airwallex for $1.2 billion. At the time, the Melbourne company’s annual revenue was about $2 million. The math was almost very attractive, with an earnings multiple of about 600x. Mr. Moritz argued that Patrick Collison was a generational founder. This agreement would be “complicated” into something unusual. Zhang asked. He walked around San Francisco for two weeks, restless and unable to think straight. At one point he said that.
He then flew about 8,000 miles back home.
“We did a thorough investigation into the motivations for building Airwallex,” he told this editor from abroad earlier this week. “I’ve been in the business for three and a half years. The business has grown 100 times in 2018, and I’ve only just had a taste of that growth.” [was like] Becoming an entrepreneur. And that’s what I dreamed of. ”
It helped that two of his three co-founders had voted against the deal. But the clearest signal, he says, came when he looked at the whiteboard in his office. The vision still existed, unfinished. The idea was to create a financial infrastructure that would allow any business anywhere in the world to operate as if it were a local company.
This decision seems increasingly prescient. Airwallex currently claims annual revenue of over $1.3 billion and growing 85% year over year. It processes nearly $300 billion in annual transaction volume. None of this was easy to achieve. And that, Zhang argues, is what matters.
This is a much deeper belief than a business strategy. Zhang grew up in the northeastern Chinese port city of Qingdao and moved to Melbourne at the age of 15 without his parents, speaking little English and living with a host family. When his family’s finances collapsed, he took on four jobs to pursue a computer science degree at the University of Melbourne, according to the Australian Financial Review – bartending, washing dishes, working as a graveyard worker at a gas station and picking lemons on a farm during school holidays, which he calls the hardest job he’s ever had. He continued to spend years writing trading code in the front office of an Australian investment bank, a job that paid well but never felt “deeply fulfilling.”
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Before founding Airwallex, he started about 10 businesses. At the age of 14, he started a magazine, a real estate development company, an import/export business running wine and olive oil from Australia to Asia, a business in another direction in textiles, and a burger chain.
He was running a coffee shop in Melbourne when the idea for Airwallex took shape. His co-founder, Max Lee, continued to watch money disappear into the correspondent banking system while trying to pay coffee bean suppliers in Brazil, Indonesia, and Guatemala. The money was flagged and frozen by the American intermediary banks that enforce OFAC sanctions rules, sometimes returning weeks after it was sent. “This led us to seriously consider how correspondent banking works, how SWIFT works, and how we can build our own global funds transfer network,” Zhang said.
It’s still an idea, just scaled up significantly. Airwallex currently holds nearly 90 financial licenses across 50 markets. Zhang estimates that Stripe’s number is at most about half that number. Obtaining these licenses is very time consuming, with the process taking seven years in Japan alone. In some emerging markets, companies have had to completely rebuild their technology by buying shell companies whose central banks no longer license them.
“You can’t really code integration with Mexico’s central bank,” Chan said. “We need to have a secure room. To access central bank integration, you have to do a biometric scan just to get inside.”
Holding these licenses is not a regulatory window dressing. For example, in Japan, Stripe and Square can process payments, but the funds must be transferred to the merchant’s bank account immediately. Airwallex has a funds transfer operator license, which allows it to keep those funds within its ecosystem. This means customers can open bank accounts, issue cards, and spend money without leaving the platform.
The economics of foreign exchange alone are significant. U.S. merchants who settle transactions in Australian dollars can avoid the 2% to 3% exchange fees that processors like Stripe typically charge to convert back to USD. You can also use that local balance to pay local vendors, cover payroll and digital marketing costs, all at interbank rates.
“We can no longer operate like American companies,” Chan said. “You can operate like a company with entities all over the world, but without having to physically set up those entities.”
The slow build is intentional, and Zhang has a framework for it that he returns to often, or the “path of greatest resistance.” All the licenses, all the bank integrations, all the local payment rails that Airwallex painstakingly assembled created layers that made it difficult to compete. “It took us six and a half years to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue,” Zhang said. “But then it took just over three years to reach 1 billion people.”
The logic of competition, he says, comes down to the fundamentals of what it means to own infrastructure and to use someone else’s infrastructure. You don’t control the end-to-end payment workflow and if something goes wrong, you don’t have access to the underlying data to explain it to your customers. You can’t neatly scale new products on top of someone else’s stack. “Building on top of other infrastructure simply doesn’t scale,” he said.
For most of their lives, Airwallex and Stripe have primarily operated in different geographies and sold to different buyers. That is changing. The overlap is growing as Stripe expands further into international markets and Airwallex makes its first major foray into the United States.
Airwallex’s buyers have historically been CFO offices in Australia and Southeast Asia. There, the company already has an established finance director and finance team, making its customer acquisition a different sales effort than Stripe, whose customer acquisition has largely been driven by U.S. developers choosing the new company’s default starting point. More than 90% of Airwallex customers arrive at the business account product first, followed by payments and spending management from there. According to Zhang, more than half use multiple products.
Still, there are challenges that Chan won’t downplay. The biggest factor may be that Stripe is Silicon Valley’s golden child, and its private equity has produced billionaires across the tech industry. The other thing is the brand gap that accompanies this. Airwallex needs to be built into the mindset of engineers and developers, as well as finance teams, so founders can instinctively reach for it. “Our brand is not established yet,” he said. “That’s a tough competition to win.”
This is a competition that attracts attention from various angles. Sequoia was an early backer of Airwallex, and the deal was done through Sequoia Capital China, which has since been spun out and rebranded as Hongshan and remains one of the company’s largest shareholders. Investment firm Greenoaks Capital also owns shares in both companies. Zhang dismissed any troubling suggestions about overlapping cap tables. He noted that investors are betting on a large market.
Still, the question of evaluation arises. Stripe was valued at $159 billion in a February takeover offer after processing $1.9 trillion in total payments in 2025, up 74% from a year ago. Airwallex, which was assigned an $8 billion valuation in December, is valued at about one-twentieth that amount. However, Stripe’s payment volume is only about 6 times that of Airwallex, instead of 20 times, according to Zhang. With an annual growth rate of 85% and expected revenue of $2 billion over the next year, Airwallex is on track to close the earnings gap faster than the valuation gap suggests.
Whether the market will eventually notice is another question, but Zhang says an IPO will take at least three to five years and will likely be forced public.
In the meantime, Zhang said he is focusing on longer-term goals. By 2030, the company would have 1 million customers, $20 billion in annual sales, and average sales per customer of about $20,000, up from about $12,000 to $13,000 today. A series of AI-powered autonomous financial products – agents that don’t just surface data but actually execute transactions – are now being deployed. The hypothesis, he suggests, is that 10 years of financial data across company finances, from revenue collection to financial management to vendor payments and expenses, has created a training set that competitors can’t replicate overnight.
Now, let’s see if that hard work is enough to eat into Stripe’s market share. For now, the competition appears to be far away. Mr. Chan and Mr. Collison were never friends, but they were friendly while merger negotiations were underway several years ago. Last year, Mr. Chan and Mr. Collison both attended Green Oaks Capital’s annual meeting. they didn’t say anything.
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