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 invited him to his house — several stories high, Zhang recalls, with a direct view of the Golden Gate Bridge — to put it up for sale.
Stripe wanted to buy Airwallex for $1.2 billion. At the time, the Melbourne company’s annual revenue was about $2 million. The math was almost irresistible: the return was close to 600 times. Patrick Collison, Moritz claimed, was the founder of the generation. The contract will “merge” into something unusual. Zhang listened. He wandered around San Francisco for two weeks, restless, unable to think straight. At one point she said yes.
Then he flew about 8,000 miles home.
“I really dug deep into what motivated me to build Airwallex,” he told this editor from overseas earlier this week. “I was in this business for three and a half years. In 2018, the business grew 100 times. I just got a taste of being an entrepreneur. And it was what I dreamed of.”
Two of its three co-founders voted against the deal, which helped. But he says the clearest signal comes from looking at the board in his office. The vision was still incomplete: to build a financial infrastructure that would allow any business to operate as a local company anywhere in the world.
This decision seems more and more advanced. Airwallex now claims annual revenue of over $1.3 billion and is growing 85% year over year. Annual transaction volume is approaching 300 billion dollars. None of this has come easily – and Zhang argues that that’s the point.
It is a belief that goes deeper than a business strategy. Zhang grew up in Qingdao, a port city in northeastern China, and moved to Melbourne at age 15 without his parents, barely speaking English, and living with a host family. When his family’s finances collapsed, he worked four jobs to complete a computer science degree at Melbourne University – bartending, washing dishes, working graveyard shifts at a gas station, picking lemons on a farm during school holidays, which he called the hardest job he’d ever done, according to the Australian Financial Review. He spent years writing trading code in the front office of an Australian investment bank, which paid well and never felt “deeply fulfilling”.
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Before Airwallex, he started about 10 businesses: a magazine at age 14, a real estate development company, an import-export operation dealing in wine and olive oil from Australia to Asia, textiles that went the other way, 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, co-founder Max Lee continued to watch payments disappear into correspondent banking systems — frozen by American intermediary banks that enforced OFAC sanctions rules, sometimes returning weeks after they were sent. “It made me really look at how correspondent banking works,” Zhang said, “how SWIFT works and how we can build our own global money movement network.”
It’s still the idea, just greatly expanded. Airwallex currently has around 90 financial licenses in 50 markets. Zhang estimates that Stripe has about half that number at best. Obtaining these licenses took a long time – in Japan alone, the process took seven years. In some emerging markets, the company had to buy shell companies whose licenses were no longer issued by central banks, then completely rebuild the technology underneath.
“You can’t really vibe-code integration with Mexico’s central bank,” Zhang said. “We have to have a safe room – you just have to do a biometric scan to get into the central bank integration.”
The purpose of maintaining these licenses is not regulatory window dressing. In Japan, for example, Stripe and Square can process payments, but they are required to immediately transfer the money to the merchant’s bank account. Airwallex can hold these funds in its ecosystem with a funds transfer operator license. This means that the customer can provide bank accounts, issue cards and spend money without ever leaving the platform.
The currency economy alone is significant: A US merchant transacting in Australian dollars avoids the 2% to 3% conversion fee that processors like Stripe typically charge to transfer money to US dollars – and can use it to pay local vendors, manage payroll and cover digital marketing costs.
“You no longer operate as a US company,” Zhang said. “You operate as a company with organizations all over the world, but you don’t need to physically build those organizations.”
The slow build was intentional, and Zhang has a framework he often returns to: “path of maximum resistance.” Every license, every bank integration, every local payment line that Airwallex painstakingly collected created a layer that made competition difficult. “It took us six and a half years to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue,” Zhang said. “But after that, it took just over three years to reach a billion.”
The logic of competition, he says, comes down to something fundamental about what it means to own infrastructure and drive someone else’s. If you don’t control the end-to-end payment workflow, and if something goes wrong, you won’t have access to key information to explain to your customer. You can’t extend new products cleanly on top of someone else’s stack. “Building on top of other infrastructure,” he said, “just doesn’t scale.”
For most of their lives, Airwallex and Stripe have operated primarily in different geographies and sold to different buyers. This is changing. It coincides with Stripe delving deeper into international markets and Airwallex making its first serious forays into the US.
Airwallex’s buyer has historically been CFO offices in Australia and Southeast Asia, where the company is already well-established – CFOs, treasury teams – which puts it in a different sales pitch than Stripe, which is run by US developers, who chose the default starting point for a new company based on customer engagement. Over 90% of Airwallex customers land on the business account product first, and payments and expense management come from there. More than half use more than one product, Zhang says.
Still, there are problems that Zhang doesn’t try to downplay. Perhaps the biggest is Stripe, the golden child of Silicon Valley, whose private equity has made millionaires in the tech industry. Another is the accompanying brand gap. Airwallex needs to embed itself in the minds of engineers and developers—not just finance teams—so founders can instinctively embrace it. “Our brand isn’t there yet,” he said. “It’s a tougher competition to win.”
It’s a closely watched race from different vantage points. Sequoia backed Airwallex early on – although the deal was clinched through Sequoia Capital China, which has since been spun off and rebranded as Hongshan – and remains one of the company’s largest shareholders. Investment firm Greenoaks Capital also has a stake in both companies. Zhang dismissed any suggestion of awkwardness around overlapping cap tables. According to him, investors are betting on a big market.
Again, it raises the question of valuation. Stripe rated 159 billion dollars In the February tender offer – after processing $1.9 trillion of total payment volume in 2025 – is 74% more than the previous year. airwallex, 8 billion dollars the assessment in December is estimated at about one-twentieth of that. But according to Zhang, Stripe’s payment volume is only six times, not 20 times that of Airwallex. With 85% year-over-year growth and forecast revenue of $2 billion over the next year, Airwallex is closing the revenue gap faster than the valuation gap suggests.
Whether the market will eventually take notice is a different question — one that Zhang said would be open to an IPO for at least three to five years.
Meanwhile, Zhang says he’s focused on longer-horizon goals: One million customers by 2030, $20 billion a year, and average revenue per customer will rise from about $12,000 to $13,000 today to about $20,000. A suite of AI-powered autonomous financial products—agents that not only provide data but execute transactions—are now rolling out. The thesis is that a decade of financial data across the entire corporate finance stack, from revenue collection to treasury management to vendor payments and expenses, has created a training set that no competitor can replicate overnight.
Now to see if all that hard work is enough to eat into Stripe’s market share. For now, the competition goes a long way. Zhang and Collison were never friends, but they were when merger talks were underway years ago. Last year, Zhang and Collison were both at Greenoaks Capital’s annual meeting. They did not speak.
