Jack Zhang was 34 years old, had been running a startup for three and a half years, and was sitting across from one of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley. Sequoia’s Michael Moritz had invited him to his house—a place with, Zhang recalls, a couple of floors and a direct view of the Golden Gate Bridge—to make the case for the sale.
Stripe wanted to buy Airwallex for $1.2 billion. At the time, the Melbourne company had about $2 million in annualized revenue. The calculations were almost irresistible: a revenue multiple close to 600 times. Patrick Collison, Moritz argued, was a generational founder. The agreement “would become” something extraordinary. Zhang listened. He walked around San Francisco for two weeks, restless, unable to think clearly. At one point he said yes.
He then flew nearly 8,000 miles back home.
“I really dug into what motivates me to build Airwallex,” he said earlier this week, speaking to this foreign editor. “I had been in business for three and a half years. The business was growing 100 times in 2018. And I barely got a taste of what (it was) to be an entrepreneur. And that’s what I had been dreaming of.”
Two of its three co-founders voted against the deal, which helped. But he says the clearest sign came from looking at the whiteboard in his office. The vision was still there, unfinished: to build the financial infrastructure that allows any business to operate anywhere in the world as if it were a local company.
That decision seems increasingly prescient. Airwallex now claims over $1.3 billion in annualized revenue and is growing at 85% year over year. It processes nearly $300 billion in annualized transaction volume. None of this has been easy, and Zhang maintains that that is precisely the point.
It is a conviction that goes far beyond business strategy. Zhang grew up in Qingdao, a port city in northeastern China, and moved to Melbourne at age 15 without her parents, barely speaking English, and living with a host family. When his family’s finances collapsed, he took four jobs to earn a computer science degree at the University of Melbourne, according to the Australian Financial Review: waiting tables, washing dishes, working night shifts at a gas station, picking lemons on a farm during school holidays, what he has called the hardest job he ever had. He then spent years writing trading code in the front office of an Australian investment bank, a job that paid well and which he never found “deeply satisfying.”
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Before Airwallex, he started about 10 businesses: a magazine at age 14, a property development company, wine and olive oil import-export operations from Australia to Asia, textiles going in the other direction, a hamburger chain.
I was running a café in Melbourne when the idea for Airwallex took shape. While trying to pay coffee bean suppliers in Brazil, Indonesia and Guatemala, co-founder Max Li continued to watch payments disappear into correspondent banking systems, flagged and frozen by U.S. intermediary banks enforcing OFAC sanctions rules, and sometimes recovered weeks after they were sent. “That prompted me to really look at how correspondent banking works,” Zhang said, “how SWIFT works and how we could build our own global money movement network.”
That’s still the idea, it’s just been expanded considerably. Airwallex now holds nearly 90 financial licenses in 50 markets. Zhang estimates Stripe has about half that number at best. Obtaining those licenses has taken a long time: 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 completely rebuild the underlying technology.
“You can’t really codify an integration with Mexico’s central bank,” Zhang said. “We have to have a secure room; you have to do a biometric scan just to get in and access the central bank integration.”
The purpose of holding these licenses is not regulatory window dressing. In Japan, for example, Stripe and Square can process payments, but must immediately transfer funds to the merchant’s bank account. Airwallex, with its funds transfer operator license, can keep those funds within its ecosystem. That means a customer can open bank accounts, issue cards, and spend money without having to leave the platform.
The foreign exchange economics alone are substantial: A US merchant settling transactions in Australian dollars avoids the 2% to 3% conversion fee that processors like Stripe typically charge to transfer money back to US dollars, and can use those local balances to pay local suppliers, manage payroll, and cover digital marketing expenses, all at interbank rates.
“It’s not really operated like an American company anymore,” Zhang said. “It is operated as a company with entities around the world, but without the need to physically establish those entities.”
The slow build was intentional and Zhang has a framework for it that he returns to frequently: the “path of maximum resistance.” Every license, every banking integration, every local payment gateway that Airwallex painstakingly put together created a layer that makes it harder to compete. “It took us six and a half years to get to $100 million in annual recurring revenue,” Zhang said. “But after that, it took just over three years to reach a billion.”
Competitive logic, in his telling, boils down to something basic about what it means to own infrastructure versus take advantage of someone else’s. If you don’t control the end-to-end payment workflow and something goes wrong, you won’t be able to access the underlying data to explain it to your customer. You can’t spread new products cleanly on top of someone else’s pile. “Building on top of other infrastructure,” he said, “is simply not scalable.”
For most of their lives, Airwallex and Stripe have primarily operated in different geographies, selling to different buyers. That is changing. As Stripe moves deeper into international markets and Airwallex makes its first serious moves in the United States, the overlap is increasing.
Historically, Airwallex’s buyer has been the CFO’s office in Australia and Southeast Asia, where the company is already well established (CFOs, treasury teams), putting it in a different sales motion than Stripe, whose customer acquisition has been largely driven by US developers choosing a predetermined starting point for a new company. More than 90% of Airwallex customers first access a merchant account product, and payments and expense management follow from there. More than half use multiple products, Zhang says.
Still, there are challenges that Zhang doesn’t try to downplay. The most important may be that Stripe is the golden child of Silicon Valley, since its private shares have made millionaires throughout the technology industry. Another is the brand gap that accompanies it. Airwallex needs to be integrated into the thinking of engineers and developers (not just finance teams) so that founders use it instinctively. “Our brand is not there yet,” he said. “That’s a tougher competition to win.”
It is a competition that is followed closely from various points of view. Sequoia backed Airwallex from the beginning, although the deal was obtained through Sequoia Capital China, which has since been spun off and renamed Hongshan, and remains one of the company’s largest shareholders. Investment company Greenoaks Capital also has stakes in both companies. Zhang ignored any suggestion of discomfort around those overlapping cap tables. Investors, he highlighted, are betting on a large market.
Still, it raises the question of valuation. Stripe was rated at $159 billion in a February public offering (up 74% from a year ago) after processing $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025. Airwallex, allocated a $8 billion valuation in December, it is valued at approximately one-twentieth of that figure. But according to Zhang, Stripe’s payment volume is only six times that of Airwallex, not 20 times. With 85% annual growth and a projected $2 billion in revenue over the next year, Airwallex is closing the revenue gap faster than the valuation gap would suggest.
Whether the market eventually catches on is a different question, one that an IPO, which Zhang said is at least three to five years away, would force to come to light.
In the meantime, Zhang says he’s focused on longer-term goals: one million customers by 2030, $20 billion in annual revenue, average revenue per customer growing from about $12,000 to $13,000 today to about $20,000. A suite of autonomous financial products powered by artificial intelligence (agents that not only display data but actually execute transactions) are currently being launched. 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 let’s see if all that hard work is enough to reduce Stripe’s market share. For now, the competition seems to take place at 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 at Greenoaks Capital’s annual meeting. They didn’t speak.
