Jack Zhang was 34 years old, three and a half years into running a startup, and sitting across from one of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley. Michael Moritz of Sequoia had invited him to his home — a place with, Zhang recalls, a few stories and a direct view of the Golden Gate Bridge — to make the case for the sale.
Stripe wanted to buy Airwallex for DKK 1.2 billion. At the time, the Melbourne company had about $2 million in annual revenue. The math was almost pretty irresistible: a revenue multiple somewhere close to 600 times. Patrick Collison, Moritz argued, was a generational founder. The deal would “combine” into something extraordinary. Zhang listened. He walked around San Francisco for two weeks, restless, unable to think clearly. At one point he said yes.
Then he flew almost 8,000 miles back home.
“I went really deep into what motivates me to build Airwallex,” he said earlier this week when speaking to this editor from overseas. “I was three and a half years into the business. The business grew 100 times in 2018. And I’ve only just tasted what it’s like [was like] to be an entrepreneur. And that was what I had dreamed of.”
Two of his three co-founders had voted against the deal, which helped. But he says the clearest signal came from looking at the whiteboard in his office. The vision was still there, unfinished: to build the financial infrastructure that lets any business operate anywhere in the world as if it were a local business.
That decision is looking increasingly predictable. Airwallex now claims more than $1.3 billion in annual revenue and is growing at 85% year-on-year. It processes close to $300 billion in annual transaction volume. None of it has come easily – and Zhang claims that’s precisely the point.
It is a belief that runs much deeper than business strategy. Zhang grew up in Qingdao, a port city in northeastern China, and moved to Melbourne at 15 without her parents, who barely spoke English, to live with a host family. When his family’s finances collapsed, according to the Australian Financial Review, he took on four jobs to put himself through a degree in computer science at the University of Melbourne – bartending, washing dishes, working the graveyard shift at a petrol station, picking lemons on a farm during the school holidays, which he has called the hardest job he’s ever had. He went on to spend years writing trading code in the front office of an Australian investment bank, a job that paid well and never felt “deeply satisfying”.
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Before Airwallex, he started about 10 companies: a magazine at the age of 14, a property development company, import-export company that runs wine and olive oil from Australia to Asia, textiles in the other direction, a burger chain.
He was running a coffee shop in Melbourne when the idea for Airwallex took shape. While trying to pay coffee bean suppliers in Brazil, Indonesia and Guatemala, his co-founder Max Li kept seeing payments disappear into correspondent banking systems — flagged and frozen by U.S. intermediary banks enforcing OFAC sanctions rules, sometimes bouncing back weeks after they were sent. “It pushed me to really look at how correspondent banking works,” Zhang said, “how SWIFT works and how we could build our own global network for money movement.”
It’s still the idea, just scaled up considerably. Airwallex now has close to 90 financial licenses in 50 markets. Zhang estimates that Stripe has about half that number at best. It has been extremely time-consuming to obtain these licenses – in Japan alone, the process took seven years. In some emerging markets, the company had to acquire shell companies whose licenses were no longer issued by central banks and then rebuild the technology under them entirely.
“You can’t really vibe-code an integration with Mexico’s central bank,” Zhang said. “We need to have a secure space – you have to do a biometric scan just to get in to access the central bank integration.”
The point of having these licenses is not statutory window screening. In Japan, Stripe and Square can e.g. process payments, but they are required to immediately transfer funds to the merchant’s bank account. With its money transfer operator license, Airwallex can keep these funds within its ecosystem. This means that a customer can open bank accounts, issue cards and spend money without ever leaving the platform.
The currency economics alone are significant: A US merchant settling transactions in Australian dollars avoids the 2% to 3% conversion fee that processors like Stripe typically charge to move money back into US dollars – and can use those local balances to pay local suppliers, run payroll and cover digital marketing expenses, all at interbank rates.
“You don’t really operate like an American company anymore,” Zhang said. “You act like a company with devices around the world, but without having to physically set up those devices.”
The slow build was deliberate, and Zhang has a framework for it that he often returns to: “the path to maximum resistance.” Each license, each bank integration, each local payment rail that Airwallex painstakingly assembled created a layer that makes it harder to compete against. “It took us six and a half years to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue,” Zhang said. “But after that, it took a little over three years to get to a billion.”
The logic of competition, in his telling, comes down to something fundamental about what it means to own infrastructure versus riding someone else’s. If you don’t control the end-to-end payment workflow and something goes wrong, you can’t access the underlying data to explain it to your customer. You cannot extend new products purely on top of someone else’s stack. “Building on top of other infrastructure,” he said, “is simply not scalable.”
For most of its life, Airwallex and Stripe have mostly operated in different geographies and sold to different buyers. That is about to change. As Stripe pushes deeper into international markets and Airwallex makes its first serious moves into the US, the overlap is growing.
The buyer for Airwallex has historically been the CFO’s office in Australia and Southeast Asia, where the company is already well-established – CFOs, treasury teams – which puts it in a different sales movement than Stripe, whose customer acquisition has been largely driven by US developers who have chosen a default starting point for a new business. More than 90% of Airwallex customers land on a business account product first, and payments and spending management follow from there. Over half use multiple products, says Zhang.
Still, there are challenges that Zhang doesn’t try to downplay. The biggest may be that Stripe is Silicon Valley’s golden child, with its privately held stock making millionaires across the tech industry. Another is the accompanying brand gap. Airwallex needs to embed itself in the thinking of engineers and developers – not just finance teams – so founders instinctively reach for it. “Our brand just isn’t there yet,” he said. “It’s a tougher competition to win.”
It is a competition that is closely watched from a number of different points of view. Sequoia backed Airwallex early on – although the deal was sourced through Sequoia Capital China, which has since spun off and rebranded as Hongshan – and remains one of the company’s largest shareholders. Investment firm Greenoaks Capital also owns shares in both companies. Zhang shrugged off any hint of awkwardness around the overlapping cap tables. The investors, he noted, are betting on a big market.
Still, it raises the valuation question. Stripe was valued at $159 billion in a takeover bid in February — up 74% from a year earlier — after processing $1.9 trillion in total payment volume by 2025. Airwallex, which was assigned an $8 billion valuation in December, is valued at about a twentieth of that. But according to Zhang, Stripe’s payment volume is only about six times that of Airwallex, not 20 times. With 85% annual growth and $2 billion in revenue within the next year, Airwallex is closing the revenue gap faster than the valuation gap suggests.
Whether the market ultimately notices is another question — one that an IPO, which Zhang says is at least three to five years away, would force into the open.
In the meantime, Zhang says he has focused on longer-term goals: one million customers by 2030, $20 billion in annual revenue, average revenue per customer grows from about $12,000 to $13,000 today to about $20,000. A suite of AI-powered autonomous finance products — agents that don’t just generate data, but actually execute transactions — are rolling out now. The thesis is that a decade of financial data across the entire corporate finance stack, from revenue collection to treasury management to supplier payments and expenses, has created a training set that no competitor can replicate overnight, he suggests.
Now to see if all that hard work is enough to eat into Stripe’s market share. For now, the competition seems to be playing from a distance. Zhang and Collison were never friends, but they were friendly while merger talks were underway years ago. Last year, Zhang and Collison were both at Greenoaks Capital’s annual gathering. They didn’t speak.