It took Jack Zhang 10 startups to figure out what he truly wanted to do. His most recent one, Airwallex, turned him into a billionaire.

Zhang launched the fintech payments company in 2015 in Melbourne, Australia, and found a niche helping global companies pay offshore vendors and employees. He has since led Airwallex to expand well beyond payments, offering global bank accounts, corporate cards, bill payments and bookkeeping. Its 300,000 customers span 47 countries, including China, Japan, the U.K., Mexico and the U.S.

The cofounder and CEO owns 12% of the company, a stake now worth $1.3 billion. That follows a fundraise earlier this month, when Airwallex secured $320 million at an $11 billion valuation. The new investment was led by Lee Fixel’s Addition, with additional backing from Baillie Gifford, QED, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia and Haun Ventures, among others.

Zhang grew up in Shandong, China, and was raised primarily by his grandmother. His parents, both bankers, worked so much that he only saw them on weekends. In 2000 at age 15, he was sent to live in Australia with a host family because his father thought Zhang was too rebellious to stay in China. “I spoke up a lot, and my dad felt I was probably more suitable for Western culture,” says Zhang, now 41.

Just a year later, his father lost his job, forcing Zhang to support himself and later pay his own tuition at the University of Melbourne. He worked as a dishwasher, did overnight shifts as a gas station attendant and became a bartender. During summers, he worked at a lemon factory, carrying boxes of lemons and piling them onto gigantic crates for 12 hours a day.

After graduating from college in 2007 with a degree in computer science, Zhang worked as a software engineer at an insurance company and then as an algorithmic trader at National Australia Bank, where he traded foreign currencies. Yet during his spare time, he also helped launch over a half-dozen small businesses, which ranged from a real estate development company to a burger chain. “I was really just trying to figure out what I wanted to do,” he says.

While running a coffee shop business, he saw how painful global money movement could be. To buy coffee beans, he had to pay Western Union a 4.5% money-transfer fee–a $15,000 order cost him more than $500. Sometimes, he’d have to wait weeks to find out that one of his company’s payments had failed. He launched Airwallex in 2015 with his cofounders Jacob Dai, Lucy Liu and Max Li to make global business-to-business payments faster and cheaper.

Liu provided Airwallex with its initial $1 million in seed funding, and the startup soon raised $3 million more from small VC firms. Zhang’s first product was a peer-to-peer, foreign-currency matching system where people and businesses sending money in opposite directions could pair up so the money didn’t have to cross borders. It quickly failed after Zhang realized he needed too much transaction volume to make it work. His second idea was an invoicing service for small businesses, but that flopped too when he saw how expensive it was to acquire small business customers.

It wasn’t until 2018, after Airwallex began helping large companies with foreign-currency conversions and mass payouts, that Airwallex’s business and revenues began to surge. It landed customers like Singapore-based retailer Shein, processing more than $1 billion in transactions that year.

In October 2018, Stripe offered to buy Airwallex–then headquartered in Hong Kong–for $1.2 billion, even though its billion-dollar transaction volume only produced $2 million in revenue, Zhang says. (A Stripe spokesperson declined to comment.) Zhang spent the years that followed accumulating 85 banking and money-movement licenses across dozens of countries. Those permits allowed Airwallex to develop its own payment rails by connecting directly to countries’ central-bank and local-clearing systems, bypassing the correspondent-bank Swift network. Swift, first developed in the 1970s, can be expensive because banks tack on fees at each step of a payment’s journey.

In 2020, Airwallex expanded into corporate charge cards and payment processing, allowing its customers to accept online consumer payments. Three years later, it moved its headquarters to Singapore and in late 2025 adopted a dual headquarters of San Francisco and Singapore. By March 2026, Zhang had grown the company to process more than $250 billion in annual transactions and to reach a revenue run-rate of $1.3 billion, though it’s still not profitable. Its customers range from small businesses to large tech firms, including Canva, Deel, Brex and Afterpay.

Today, Airwallex earns its revenue through foreign-exchange fees, payment-processing fees, interchange fees on corporate-card spending, software subscription fees and interest-rate spreads. Zhang says 61% of Airwallex’s business is based in Asia, 22% comes from the Americas and 17% originates in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

He sees Airwallex’s role in originating customers’ bank accounts as a strategic advantage that will increasingly make it easy for Airwallex to expand its services. The company’s AI agents help customers speed up expense management, and with its new T:0 product, which it expects to launch in a few weeks, it aims to automate more finance functions like bookkeeping and forecasting. It’s easier for CFOs to reconcile the books when they work with just one company for their bank accounts, payment processor and corporate cards, argues Zhang.

Increasingly, Airwallex expects its full suite of products to compete with those of Stripe and Ramp in areas ranging from payment processing and business accounts to expense management and corporate cards. Both are formidable competitors–last year, Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in payments, while earlier this month, Ramp announced that it handles $200 billion in annualized purchase volume.

Airwallex is also incubating a fledgling cryptocurrency startup called Metal, led by software developer Loong Wang and former Meta executive Catherine Porter, which aims to be a blockchain for tokenized financial products. Metal intends to help Airwallex process stablecoin payments, which Zhang thinks could make up 5% to 10% of global money movement over the next ten years. Stripe has incubated its own payments blockchain called Tempo that launched this past March.

While Airwallex’s global focus has been a boon to its business, it has also led to politically charged scrutiny. In December 2025, Khosla Ventures managing director Keith Rabois, who is on the board of rival Ramp, wrote on X that Airwallex was sending its U.S. customers’ data to China. He claimed the company’s employee base in China and partial ownership by Tencent and venture capital firm HongShan (formerly Sequoia China) legally required Airwallex to hand over U.S. customer data to the Chinese government upon request. Last week, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying Airwallex should be investigated for its “ties to Communist China.”

In a June 9 blog post, Zhang called Rabois’ allegations “patently false” and said they contained “wild and totally unfounded conspiracy theories about me.” Regarding U.S. customers, he wrote, “U.S. customer data is stored in the U.S. Like other global financial institutions, we have staff based in China and Hong Kong because we operate globally and these are important markets. But those staff cannot access U.S. customer data.” (Companies ranging from JPMorgan Chase and Citi to PayPal and Adyen also have staff in China.) Recently, Airwallex has gone so far as to commission and publish a security assessment by cybersecurity firm Coalfire. The report said Airwallex’s systems for access restrictions “go beyond minimum expectations.”

Payments industry executives we spoke with outside of Airwallex didn’t believe the security claims against Zhang’s company had merit. Paul Bassat, a cofounder at top Australian VC firm Square Peg and a large investor in Airwallex, thinks Zhang and his cofounders get treated unfairly because they’re ethnically Chinese.

Data security concerns aside, staying on the right side of regulation is critical in cross-border payments. In January 2026, Australia’s anti-money-laundering regulator announced it was doing an audit of Airwallex for “suspected AML/CTF compliance failures.” Zhang says he can’t comment on the status of the audit but believes it’s part of an “industry-wide” regulatory effort to monitor fintech companies.

Strategically, Zhang’s biggest challenge will be expansion and compliance while simultaneously competing with veteran fintechs like Stripe, Ramp and Mercury. “We are not trying to be a collection of point solutions,” says Airwallex’s SVP of communications and public affairs Rachael Horwitz. “We are solving a different problem: How do you give a globally operating business one platform instead of asking it to stitch together five or six?”

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