Jack Zhang was 34 years old, had been running a startup for three and a half years, and was facing one of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley. Michael Moritz of Sequoia invited him to his home. Zhang offered to sell the house, which was several floors up and directly overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
Stripe wanted to acquire Airwallex for $1.2 billion. At the time, the Melbourne company had annual revenues of about $2 million. The calculation was almost irresistible. The profit was nearly 600x. Moritz claimed that Patrick Collison was the founder of the generation. The deal will be “compounded” into something special. The chief heard. He wandered around San Francisco for two weeks, unable to come to his senses. At one point he said yes.
He then flew nearly 8,000 miles back home.
“I really thought about what motivated me to create Airwallex,” he said, speaking to an editor from overseas earlier this week. “I’ve been in this business for three and a half years. It grew 100x in 2018, and I just got a taste of what it’s like to be an entrepreneur. It’s what I dreamed of.”
Two of his three co-founders voted against the deal, which helped. But he said the clearest signal came from looking at the whiteboard in his office. The vision remained, unfinished. The idea is to build a financial infrastructure that allows you to run your business anywhere in the world as if you were a local company.
That decision is looking increasingly prescient. Airwallex currently has annual sales of more than $1.3 billion and is growing 85% year-over-year. Annual transaction volume is approximately $300 billion. None of this has come easily. That, Zhang argues, is precisely the point.
This is a belief that goes much deeper than business strategy. Zhang grew up in Qingdao, a port city in northeastern China, and moved to Melbourne without her parents when she was 15, speaking little English and living with a host family. As his family’s finances collapsed, he worked four jobs to earn a degree in computer science at the University of Melbourne, according to the Australian Financial Review. He said it was the hardest job he’d ever had – bartending, washing dishes, working the graveyard shift at a gas station, and picking lemons on a farm during school breaks. He spent several years writing trading code in the front office of an Australian investment bank, a job that paid well but never left him “deeply fulfilled.”
Tech Crunch Event
San Francisco, California
|
October 13-15, 2026
Before Airwallex, he had started about 10 businesses by the age of 14, including a magazine company, a property development company, an import-export business running wine and olive oil from Australia to Asia, and a textile and burger chain going in the opposite direction.
He was running a Melbourne coffee shop when the idea for Airwallex took shape. While attempting to pay coffee bean suppliers in Brazil, Indonesia, and Guatemala, his co-founder Max Li continued to watch payments disappear from the correspondent banking system. These were flagged and frozen by U.S. intermediary banks enforcing OFAC sanctions rules, sometimes bouncing back weeks after they were sent. “It made me really look at how correspondent banking works. It made me look at how SWIFT works and how we can build our own global money movement network,” Zhang said.
It’s still the idea and has been expanded considerably. Airwallex currently holds close to 90 financial licenses in 50 markets. Zhang estimates Stripe has about half that number at best. Obtaining such a license took an enormous amount of time. In Japan alone, the process took seven years. In some emerging markets, companies have had to acquire shell companies that are no longer licensed by central banks and then completely rebuild the technology behind them.
“You can’t really Vive code integration with the Central Bank of Mexico,” Zhang said. “We need to have a safe space. Access to central bank integration requires biometric scanning.”
The point of having these licenses is not regulatory window dressing. For example, in Japan, Stripe and Square can process payments, but they must immediately transfer the funds to the seller’s bank account. Airwallex, which holds a funds transfer operator license, can hold those funds within its ecosystem. This means customers can open bank accounts, issue cards and spend money without ever leaving the platform.
The foreign exchange economy alone is significant. US merchants who settle transactions in Australian dollars can avoid the 2% to 3% conversion fees that processors like Stripe typically charge to transfer money back to US dollars and use these local balances to pay local suppliers, make payroll and cover digital marketing costs. All of this is done at interbank rates.
“We no longer operate like an American company,” Zhang said. “We operate like a company with entities around the world, but we don’t have to physically establish those entities.”
The slow build is intentional and Zhang has a framework for it, which is the “path of greatest resistance” that he often uses. Every license, every bank integration, every local payment rail that Airwallex has painstakingly assembled has created a hierarchy that makes competition more difficult. “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.”
In his words, the logic of competition comes down to the basics of what it means to own infrastructure and ride on someone else’s. If you don’t control the end-to-end payment workflow and something goes wrong, you won’t have access to the underlying data to explain it to your customers. You can’t neatly extend a new product on top of someone else’s stack. “Building on top of other infrastructure is not scalable,” he said.
For most of that time, Airwallex and Stripe primarily operated in different geographies and sold to different buyers. That’s changing. Overlap is growing as Stripe moves deeper into international markets and Airwallex makes its first serious push into the United States.
Airwallex’s buyers have historically been CFO offices in Australia and Southeast Asia. There, the company was already well-established with a finance director, finance team and more. This will take a different sales approach from Stripe, whose customer acquisition was largely driven by US developers, who chose to be the primary starting point for the new company. More than 90% of Airwallex customers use the business account product first, with payment and spend management following from there. More than half are using multiple products, Zhang says.
Nonetheless, there are challenges Zhang does not ignore. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that Stripe is Silicon Valley’s golden child. Stripe’s private stock has created millionaires across the tech industry. Another thing is the brand gap that comes with it. Airwallex needs to engage the thinking of engineers and developers, as well as finance teams, to ensure an instinctive approach for founders. “Our brand isn’t there yet,” he said. “It’s a harder competition to win.”
It is a competition watched from various angles. Sequoia initially supported Airwallex. Although the deal was done through Sequoia Capital China, which was spun off and renamed Hongshan, it still remains one of the company’s largest shareholders. Investment firm Greenoaks Capital also holds stakes in both companies. Zhang shrugged off any suggestion that there was awkwardness around overlapping cap tables. He noted that investors are betting on big markets.
Nonetheless, valuation issues arise. Stripe was valued at $159 billion in a public offering in February after processing $1.9 trillion in total payments in 2025. This is a 74% increase over the previous year. Airwallex was valued at $8 billion in December, about a twentieth of its value. However, according to Zhang, Stripe’s payment volume is only about six times that of Airwallex, not 20 times that. Airwallex projects 85% annual growth and $2 billion in revenue next year, and is closing the revenue gap faster than its valuation gap suggests.
Whether the market will eventually notice is another matter. The IPO is at least three to five years away, Zhang said.
In the meantime, Zhang says he’s focused on longer-term goals of having 1 million customers by 2030, $20 billion in annual revenue, and growing average revenue per customer from about $12,000 currently to about $13,000 to about $20,000. AI-based autonomous finance suites are now being launched, agents that actually execute transactions rather than just surface data. He makes the case that with a decade of financial data across the entire corporate finance stack – from revenue collection to treasury management, supplier payments and expenses – he has created a training set that no competitor can replicate overnight.
Now let’s see if all that effort is enough to erode Stripe’s market share. For now, the competition seems to be taking place from a distance. Zhang and Collison were never friends, but they were friendly during merger discussions a few years ago. Last year, Zhang and Collison both attended Greenoaks Capital’s annual gathering. They didn’t speak.
