Airwallex, the Australian fintech that has spent a decade quietly building global payments infrastructure, is moving into in-person payments. The move deepens its rivalry with Stripe across the payments stack, and enables the startup to directly aim at Square and Adyen on one of the last major battlegrounds in financial technology.
Airwallex is launching a point-of-sale product that it says does something its rivals’ offerings don’t: Allow businesses to accept in-person payments in multiple countries via a single platform, without onboarding local vendors in every market.
“When a business expands into a new market, they typically have to onboard a new local acquirer, navigate fragmented compliance, and manage yet another set of vendor relationships,” CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang told TechCrunch.
In 2019, Stripe offered to acquire Airwallex for $1.2 billion, when Airwallex had just $2 million in revenue. But Zhang decided to keep building. “I even said yes to the deal,” he said, recalling the months-long negotiation. “But what really got me to change my mind is when I actually flew back to Melbourne and went deep on what motivated me to build Airwallex.”
Zhang founded Airwallex in 2015 out of frustration with the friction and expense of moving money internationally, but took a different approach than most fintech: He spent years assembling its own underlying payment rails.
Today, Airwallex, valued at $8 billion by its investors, claims it generates annualized revenue of about $1.3 billion, and that the number is growing by roughly 85% every year. The startup says it now serves more than 46,000 U.S. businesses and processes $100 billion in annual volume.
The startup currently boasts close to 90 regulatory licenses across 70 to 80 regions, direct connections to local payment networks in over 120 countries, and the ability to settle transactions in more than 90 currencies. It is the very infrastructure, Zhang says, that Stripe and …