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AIPROPX ReportFortune · 3h ago
Airwallex expands from cross-border payments to autonomous finance—though president Lucy Liu says it’s still ‘not the best time’…
Airwallex president Lucy Liu invokes a car metaphor to describe one of her company’s newest products. “It’s like assisted driving, like you have in a Tesla ,” she says to describe T:0, an automated bookkeeping system that can run a company’s entire financial department on its own. “You still have someone in the driver’s seat, but the car really drives itself.”
T:0 is part of a broader pivot for Airwallex, which got its start in Australia, and has emerged as a major global player in fintech and payments. Like platforms like Wise and Revolut, its business first grew alongside traditional industries that rely on cross-border payments, such as e-commerce, gaming, and online travel. But as AI changes how companies approach aspects of their business, including subscriptions and payment models, fintech firms like Airwallex are changing too.
In late June, Airwallex raised $320 million in a Series H funding round led by Addition, a returning investor, alongside Baillie Gifford, T. Rowe Price , Amex Ventures, and Washington University in St. Louis. The round valued Airwallex at $11 billion, up from the $8 billion valuation the startup got in December, when it raised $330 million in another Addition-led funding round.
CEO Jack Zhang, in a statement at the time, said the money would help the company “move faster into Airwallex’s next chapter: autonomous finance, agentic commerce, and the infrastructure to power both.”
“Our fundraising has been quite rapid over the past two years,” Liu tells Fortune , adding that this most recent round came as a result of “ongoing conversations” with existing investors like Addition. “We have a lot ahead of us, and we just want to be able to have enough capital to fast-charge our plans.”
Chasing customers across borders
Airwallex was founded in Melbourne, Australia over a decade ago to help businesses move money across borders. Founders Jack Zhang and Max Li have credited the difficulties in running a coffee shop that imported goods from overseas as the inspiration for the business.
The platform now serves over 675,000 businesses, with over $1 billion in annualized run rate revenue. Liu declined to give specific numbers about profitability, yet noted that the company was “EBITDA positive” and had a “healthy gross margin.”
Now, as Airwallex leans into AI, it is touting two new features: the automated bookkeeping system T:0, and Ari, an agentic consumer wallet designed for one-click checkout.
Airwallex is also expanding aggressively into new markets, including the U.S., South Korea, Mexico and Brazil. (Liu concedes it looks like the company is “expanding everywhere.”) In some locations, Airwallex expanded through acquisitions, like how it acquired a Mexican payments license through its purchase of MexPago . In other markets, Airwallex has been drawn in by its clients: Expanding into Brazil on behalf of one client tends to surface customers who want to go in the other direction, toward Asia.
“Local businesses are all looking away to expand globally, and easier ways to operate globally,” she says.
It’s also making a push into the U.S. “If you’re a U.S. company that wants to sell in Australia, wants to sell in Singapore, wants to sell in the U.K., wants to sell in Canada, wants to do that efficiently, and wants to have banking, payments, spend, and treasury management all in a single platform, that’s where Airwallex comes in,” CEO Jack Zhang told Fortune in November .
A rebound?
Airwallex’s rapid-fire fundraises are part of a broader recovery in Asian venture funding after a sluggish few years. According to KPMG , VC-backed companies across Asia raised $50.8 billion in the second quarter of the year, the strongest performance since the fourth quarter of 2021.
Still, China alone accounted for $35.1 billion of that total, and much of the attention is being paid to AI and hardware. The four largest deals in Asia all went to Chinese AI developers: DeepSeek, ByteDance, StepFun and Moonshot AI.
The recent venture spree in Asia is notable, but VC funding in the region is barely a third of that in the U.S., where the country’s startups pulled in $145 billion in the same quarter.
More and more companies are raising money in late-stage investments such as Airwallex’s most recent funding round, a once-rare Series H. Others are staying private for even longer. Data processing startup Databricks, for example, is pulling together investors for an unprecedented Series M funding round that values the firm at $188 billion.
“Investors are going more towards later stage investments,” Liu says. “It’s not that they don’t have capital. They just want to see success, right? They want to see a track record before they deploy capital into that particular company.”
Companies are also wary of going public so soon. That includes the behemoth of the payments industry, Dublin-based Stripe, which was founded in 2010 and is still holding off on an IPO despite a reported $6.8 billion in revenue.
“Larger companies are still able to raise money without going public,” Liu noted. “Most people are still a little bit on the fence about going public.”
In the wake of some mega-U.S. IPOs—namely, SpaceX’s $85.7 billion debut and SK Hynix’s $26.5 billion ADR sale —as well as likely offerings from both OpenAI and Anthropic, debuts from other companies might not get the attention of institutional investors.
Liu confirms that Airwallex is still planning to be “IPO-ready” by the end of this year, but that a firm date will depend on market conditions. “It’s just not the best time, given how complicated things are,” she says. “I’m sure all the pre-approval companies will tell you this.”
Geopolitics and regulatory scrutiny
In June, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a prominent China hawk, sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent alleging deep ties between Airwallex and Beijing. “While Airwallex markets itself as an Australian company, its ties to Communist China run d...
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