After being close to an acquisition, Stripe and Airwallex are now going after each other

Jack Chang was 34 years old, had spent three and a half years running a startup, and sitting across from one of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley. Michael Moritz, of Sequoia, had invited him to his house — a two-story place, Chang recalls, with a direct view of the Golden Gate Bridge — to pitch the sale.

Stripe wanted to buy Airwallex for $1.2 billion. At the time, the Melbourne company had annual revenue of about $2 million. The math was almost irresistible: revenue multiplied somewhere in the neighborhood of 600 times. Patrick Collison was a founder for generations, Moritz said. The deal will “escalate” into something extraordinary. Zhang listened. He wandered around San Francisco for two weeks, agitated, unable to think straight. In an instant he said yes.

Then he flew nearly 8,000 miles home.

“I really delved into what motivates me to build Airwallex,” he said earlier this week speaking to this editor from abroad. “I was three and a half years into this business. The business was growing 100 times in 2018. I had only kind of gotten a taste of what it means to be an entrepreneur. This is what I dreamed of.”

Two of its three founders voted against the deal, which helped them. But he says the clearest indication came from looking at the whiteboard in his office. The vision was still there, incomplete: to build the financial infrastructure that would allow any company to operate anywhere in the world as if it were a local company.

This decision seems increasingly prescient. Airwallex now claims over $1.3 billion in annual revenue and is growing 85% year over year. It processes approximately $300 billion in annual transaction volume. None of it is easy to achieve, and Zhang says that’s precisely the goal.

It is a conviction that is much deeper than a business strategy. Zhang grew up in Qingdao, a coastal city in northeastern China, and moved to Melbourne when he was 15 without his parents, barely speaking English, and living with a host family. When his family’s finances collapsed, he took on four jobs for a computer science degree at the University of Melbourne, according to the Australian Financial Review — bartending, washing dishes, working graveyard shifts at a petrol station, and picking lemons on a farm in school holidays, which he described as the hardest job he’d ever had. He went on to spend years writing trading code in the front office of an Australian investment bank, a job that paid well and never felt “very satisfying.”

Before Airwallex, he started about 10 companies: a magazine at the age of 14, a property development company, an import-export operation that runs wine and olive oil from Australia to Asia, textiles going the other way, and a burger chain.

He was running a café in Melbourne when the idea for Airwallex took shape. While trying to pay coffee bean suppliers in Brazil, Indonesia and Guatemala, his co-founder Max Lee kept watching payments disappear into correspondent banking systems — flagged and frozen by intermediary U.S. banks enforcing OFAC sanctions rules, and sometimes bouncing weeks after they were sent. “It prompted me to really look at how correspondent banking works, how SWIFT works, and how we can build our own global network for the movement of money,” Zhang said.

This is still the idea, and its scope has been greatly expanded. Airwallex now has approximately 90 financial licenses in 50 markets. Zhang estimates that Stripe has about half that number at best. Obtaining these licenses took a very long time: in Japan alone, the process took seven years. In some emerging markets, the company has had to acquire shell companies whose licenses are no longer issued by central banks, and then completely rebuild the technology underneath them.

“You can’t really symbolize integration with the Mexican central bank,” Chang said. “We should have a safe room – you have to do a biometric scan just to get in to access the central bank integration.”

The goal of obtaining these licenses is not regulatory window dressing. In Japan, for example, Stripe and Square can process payments, but they must immediately transfer the funds to the merchant’s bank account. Airwallex, through its own money transfer operator licence, can keep these funds within its ecosystem. This means that the customer can issue bank accounts, issue cards, and spend money without leaving the platform.

The economics of foreign exchange alone are significant: A US merchant who settles transactions in Australian dollars avoids the 2% to 3% conversion fees that processors like Stripe typically charge for converting funds back to US dollars — and can use those local balances to pay local vendors, run payroll, and cover digital marketing expenses, all at interbank interest rates.

“It doesn’t really operate like an American company anymore,” Chang said. “You operate like a company with entities all over the world, but without having to actually create those entities.”

The slow build was intentional, and Chang has a framework that he returns to often:Path of maximum resistance“Every license, every banking integration, every local payment rail that Airwallex painstakingly assembled created a layer that made competition more difficult. “It took us six and a half years to get to $100 million in annual recurring revenue,” Zhang said. “But then, it took a little over three years to get to a billion.”

The competitive logic, in his telling, goes back to something fundamental about what it means to own infrastructure versus riding someone else’s infrastructure. 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 customer. You can’t cleanly expand new products on top of someone else’s product suite. “Building on top of other infrastructure is simply not scalable,” he said.

For most of their existence, Airwallex and Stripe have mostly operated in different geographic regions, selling to different buyers. This is changing. As Stripe pushes deeper into international markets, and Airwallex makes its first serious moves in the US, the overlap is growing.

Historically, the buyer for Airwallex has been CFOs in Australia and Southeast Asia, where the company is already well-established — CFOs, treasury teams — putting it in a different sales pitch than Stripe, whose customer acquisition has been largely driven by US developers choosing a virtual starting point for a new company. Over 90% of Airwallex customers turn first to the business account product, followed by payments and spending management. Zhang says more than half use multiple products.

However, challenges remain, the importance of which Zhang does not try to downplay. Perhaps the biggest is that Stripe is the golden child of Silicon Valley, as its privately held stock has produced millionaires across the tech industry. The other reason is the accompanying brand gap. Airwallex needs to embed itself in the thinking of engineers and developers — not just finance teams — so founders can access it instinctively. “Our brand isn’t there yet,” he said. “It’s a tougher competition to win.”

It is a competition that is being closely watched from different angles. Sequoia backed Airwallex early on — although the deal was acquired through Sequoia Capital China, which has since been spun off and renamed Hongshan — and remains one of the company’s largest shareholders. Investment firm Greenoaks Capital also has stakes in both companies. Zhang ignored any hint of awkwardness around those overlapping tables. He pointed out that investors are betting on a big market.

However, it raises the question of evaluation. The tape was rated at $159 billion In a tender offer in February – up 74% from the previous year – after processing $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025. Airwallex has appointed 8 billion dollars Valuation in December, estimated at about two-tenths of that. But according to Zhang, Stripe’s payment volume is about six times that of Airwallex, not 20 times. With 85% year-over-year growth and $2 billion in revenue expected over the next year, Airwallex is closing the revenue gap faster than the valuation gap would suggest.

Whether the market will eventually notice is a different question — one that would push the IPO, which Chang says is at least three to five years away, public.

In the meantime, Chang says he’s focused on longer-term goals: 1 million customers by 2030, $20 billion in annual revenue, and average revenue per customer growing from about $12,000 to $13,000 today to nearly $20,000. A range of autonomous, AI-powered finance products are now being rolled out – agents that not only display data, but actually execute transactions. The premise, he points out, is that a decade of financial data across the entire corporate finance spectrum, from revenue collections to treasury management to vendor payments and expenses, has created a training set that no competitor can replicate overnight.

Now let’s see if all this hard work is enough to eat away at Stripe’s market share. For now, the competition appears to be taking place remotely. Chang and Collison were never friends, but they were friendly while merger talks were underway for years. Last year, Zhang and Collison were both present at Greenoaks Capital’s annual meeting. They didn’t speak.