Fintech Airwallex Hits $1.2B Annual Revenue
Global fintech Airwallex reached $1.2 billion in annualized recurring revenue, marking 85% year-over-year growth. The company, which challenges legacy banking with multi-currency accounts and same-day transfers, claims to have saved its clients $1.3 billion in 2025.
The company was founded in Melbourne in 2015 after co-founder Jack Zhang grew frustrated with the high foreign exchange fees he incurred when importing coffee beans and supplies from overseas for a cafe he owned. Zhang, a computer science graduate and former software engineer for ANZ and National Australia Bank, partnered with four fellow University of Melbourne alumni to build the platform. As of a Series G funding round in December 2025, Airwallex is valued at $8 billion, a significant increase from its $6.2 billion valuation just six months prior. The company has raised over $1.5 billion in total from investors including Square Peg, DST Global, Lone Pine Capital, Sequoia Capital China, Tencent, and Visa Ventures. While initially focused on cross-border payments and foreign exchange, the company has diversified its revenue streams significantly. Business banking accounts now represent 34% of revenues, spend management contributes 20%, and payment processing adds another 30%, with over half of its gross profit now coming from domestic payments and card issuing. Growth has been particularly strong in the Americas and EMEA, which together now account for approximately 40% of total revenue and have seen gross profit grow at a CAGR of over 250%. Airwallex serves over 200,000 corporate clients and processes an annualized transaction volume of approximately $300 billion. The company is making a strategic push into artificial intelligence, aiming to build an "AI co-pilot" to automate complex financial operations for its clients. To accelerate this, Airwallex established a second global headquarters in San Francisco in late 2025 to access top AI talent and plans to invest over $1 billion to scale its U.S. operations through 2029. Future expansion plans target new markets including Japan, the UAE, and Latin America, where it has already acquired Mexican payment provider MexPago. The company achieved positive cash flow and EBITDA profitability and is aiming to become the default financial operating system for businesses scaling globally.
