By Titik Puspa 
Jack Zhang, at 34 years old and three and a half years into his entrepreneurial journey, found himself in a pivotal moment. He was seated in the opulent home of Michael Moritz, a titan of Silicon Valley and a partner at the esteemed venture capital firm Sequoia Capital. Moritz, overlooking the iconic Golden Gate Bridge from his multi-story residence, had extended an invitation not for a casual chat, but to make a compelling case for selling his burgeoning fintech company, Airwallex, to Stripe. The offer on the table was a staggering $1.2 billion. At that juncture, Airwallex, a Melbourne-based startup, was generating a mere $2 million in annualized revenue. The math was undeniably seductive, presenting a revenue multiple that approached an astronomical 600x. Moritz, a seasoned investor with an uncanny ability to identify generational talent, championed Patrick Collison, Stripe’s co-founder, as a visionary leader. He posited that such a deal would be a catalyst, allowing Airwallex to "compound" into something truly extraordinary.
Zhang listened intently. The offer resonated, creating a profound internal conflict. He spent two weeks in San Francisco, a period marked by restless introspection, a mental fog that rendered him incapable of clear thought. In a moment of overwhelming persuasion and perhaps a touch of entrepreneurial fatigue, he said yes. The subsequent flight, spanning nearly 8,000 miles back to his home base, provided the necessary distance for a deeper reckoning.
"I really went deep on what motivates me to build Airwallex," Zhang recounted in a recent interview conducted from overseas. "I was three and a half years into the business. The business was growing 100 times in 2018, and I had only just begun to truly taste what it meant to be an entrepreneur. And that’s what I’d been dreaming about." This profound self-examination, coupled with the dissenting voices of two of his three co-founders who had voted against the acquisition, provided clarity. However, the most definitive signal emerged from a solitary moment in his office, staring at a whiteboard. The unfinished vision for Airwallex – to construct the foundational financial infrastructure that would empower any business to operate globally as if it were a local entity – remained vivid and compelling.
Zhang’s decision to spurn the lucrative offer is now proving to be remarkably prescient. Airwallex has since achieved remarkable growth, now boasting an annualized revenue exceeding $1.3 billion and maintaining a robust year-over-year growth rate of 85%. The company processes an astounding approximation of $300 billion in annualized transaction volume. This trajectory, Zhang emphasizes, has not been easy; indeed, he argues that the inherent difficulty is precisely what imbues their achievements with their true value.
This unwavering conviction is rooted deeply in Zhang’s personal history and formative experiences. He grew up in Qingdao, a bustling port city in northeastern China. At the age of 15, he relocated to Melbourne, Australia, alone, without his parents, and with a rudimentary grasp of English, living with a host family. When his family’s financial situation deteriorated significantly, he undertook four part-time jobs to fund his computer science degree at the University of Melbourne. These roles included bartending, washing dishes, working overnight shifts at a petrol station, and picking lemons during school holidays – a task he has described as the most arduous he has ever endured. Following his academic pursuits, he spent several years in the front office of an Australian investment bank, writing trading code. While this position offered financial security, it lacked the profound sense of fulfillment he craved.
Long before Airwallex, Zhang had a history of entrepreneurial experimentation, launching approximately ten ventures. These ranged from a magazine at age 14 to a real estate development company, import-export operations dealing in Australian wine and olive oil destined for Asia, textile businesses in the reverse direction, and even a burger chain. It was while running a Melbourne coffee shop that the genesis of Airwallex began to take shape. His co-founder, Max Li, observed firsthand the inefficiencies and frustrations of international payments. While attempting to pay coffee bean suppliers in Brazil, Indonesia, and Guatemala, Li witnessed payments becoming ensnared in the labyrinthine correspondent banking system. These transactions were frequently flagged and frozen by intermediary banks in the United States, often in compliance with OFAC sanctions, and sometimes reappeared weeks after their initial dispatch. "That pushed me to really look at how correspondent banking works," Zhang explained, "how SWIFT works, and how we could build our own global money movement network."
This core concept has been meticulously scaled and refined. Airwallex now holds an impressive portfolio of nearly 90 financial licenses across 50 distinct markets. Zhang estimates that Stripe possesses, at best, roughly half that number. The arduous process of obtaining these licenses has been a significant undertaking. In Japan alone, securing the necessary approvals took seven years. In certain emerging markets, Airwallex resorted to acquiring dormant shell companies whose licenses were no longer being issued by central banks, and subsequently rebuilding the underlying technology infrastructure from the ground up.
"You can’t really ‘vibe-code’ an integration with Mexico’s central bank," Zhang remarked, highlighting the tangible and stringent nature of regulatory compliance. "We have to have a secure room – you have to do a biometric scan just to walk in to access the central bank integration." The strategic imperative behind accumulating these licenses extends far beyond mere regulatory compliance. In jurisdictions like Japan, while competitors such as Stripe and Square can facilitate payment processing, they are mandated to immediately transfer funds to the merchant’s bank account. Airwallex, with its fund transfer operator license, possesses the unique capability to retain these funds within its proprietary ecosystem. This enables customers to issue bank accounts, issue cards, and conduct transactions without the funds ever leaving the Airwallex platform.
The economic advantages derived from foreign exchange alone are substantial. A U.S. merchant settling transactions in Australian dollars can circumvent the typical 2% to 3% conversion fees levied by processors like Stripe when repatriating funds to U.S. dollars. Furthermore, these local balances can be utilized for a myriad of operational expenses, including paying local vendors, managing payroll, and covering digital marketing costs, all at advantageous interbank rates. "You don’t really operate like a U.S. company anymore," Zhang stated, articulating the transformative impact of their infrastructure. "You operate like a company with entities around the world, but without needing to physically set up those entities."
This deliberate, slow-burn approach to building infrastructure is encapsulated in Zhang’s frequently referenced framework: the "path of maximum resistance." Every license acquired, every bank integration established, and every local payment rail meticulously assembled by Airwallex has created formidable barriers to entry for competitors. "It took us six and a half years to get to $100 million in annual recurring revenue," Zhang shared, contrasting this with their subsequent acceleration. "But after that, it took just over three years to get to a billion."
The competitive advantage, in Zhang’s view, stems from a fundamental understanding of owning infrastructure versus merely operating on top of someone else’s. When a company does not control the end-to-end payment workflow, it lacks the ability to access underlying data when issues arise, hindering its capacity to provide transparent explanations to customers. Moreover, it constrains the ability to seamlessly introduce new products on top of a third-party technology stack. "Building on top of other infrastructure," he asserted, "is simply not scalable."
For the majority of their existence, Airwallex and Stripe have operated in largely distinct geographical arenas, catering to different customer segments. This dynamic is now evolving. As Stripe expands its presence into international markets and Airwallex makes its initial significant inroads into the United States, the areas of overlap are increasing. Historically, Airwallex’s primary customer base has resided in Australia and Southeast Asia, where the company is well-established. These clients are typically finance directors and treasury teams within businesses. This contrasts with Stripe’s customer acquisition model, which has been largely driven by U.S. developers who select it as their default starting point for new companies. Zhang notes that over 90% of Airwallex customers initially engage with a business account product, with payments and spend management solutions following suit. A significant portion, over half, are utilizing multiple Airwallex products.
Despite these advancements, Zhang acknowledges the formidable challenges that lie ahead. Perhaps the most significant is Stripe’s status as Silicon Valley’s darling, with its privately held shares having generated substantial wealth for countless individuals within the tech industry. Another hurdle is the considerable brand recognition gap. Airwallex faces the imperative of embedding itself not only in the minds of finance professionals but also among engineers and developers, ensuring that founders instinctively consider Airwallex when launching new ventures. "Our brand is just not there yet," Zhang conceded. "That’s a harder competition to win."
This escalating competition is being closely observed from various perspectives. Sequoia Capital, though the deal originated from its China arm (now Hongshan), was an early investor in Airwallex and remains one of its largest shareholders. The investment firm Greenoaks Capital also holds stakes in both companies, a fact that Zhang dismisses as a source of awkwardness, viewing it as an indication that investors recognize the vast potential of the market.
This situation inevitably raises questions about valuation. Stripe commanded a valuation of $159 billion in a February tender offer, a 74% increase from the previous year, following its processing of $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025. Airwallex, with an $8 billion valuation established in December, is valued at approximately one-twentieth of Stripe’s figure. However, Zhang posits that Stripe’s payment volume is only about six times that of Airwallex, not twenty times. With an 85% annual growth rate and projections of reaching $2 billion in revenue within the next year, Airwallex is narrowing the revenue gap at a pace that outstrips the disparity in valuations.
Whether the broader market will recognize this convergence is a separate question, one that an initial public offering (IPO), which Zhang anticipates is at least three to five years away, would inevitably bring to the forefront. In the interim, Zhang’s focus remains steadfastly on long-term objectives: achieving one million customers by 2030, generating $20 billion in annual revenue, and increasing the average revenue per customer from its current approximately $12,000-$13,000 to around $20,000. A suite of AI-powered autonomous finance products, designed to move beyond data reporting to actual transaction execution, is currently being rolled out. Zhang’s underlying thesis is that a decade’s worth of aggregated financial data across the entire corporate finance spectrum – from revenue collection and treasury management to vendor payments and expense management – has created an unparalleled training dataset that no competitor can readily replicate.
The ultimate test will be whether this relentless dedication to building deep, resilient infrastructure is sufficient to erode Stripe’s formidable market share. For the present, the competitive confrontation appears to be playing out from a distance. While Zhang and Patrick Collison were never close friends, they maintained a cordial relationship during the merger discussions years ago. Last year, both Zhang and Collison were in attendance at Greenoaks Capital’s annual gathering. They did not engage in conversation.