- Airwallex raised $320 million at a valuation of $11 billion, up from $8 billion just six months ago.
- Revenue in March 2026 reached an annualized rate of $1.3 billion, an increase of 74% year over year.
- New AI products T:0 and Airi aim to automate finance teams and payments on their behalf.
Airwallex has completed a $320 million Series H round. The round increases the global payments company’s valuation to $11 billion from $8 billion just six months ago, and it is using the funds to build an AI system that can run a company’s entire financial function without human intervention.
The round was led by returning investor Addition, with participation from Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia, Haun Ventures, Washington University in St. Louis, and Amex Ventures.
This was achieved on the back of the company’s highest ever sales figures. In March 2026, Airwallex’s annual revenue reached $1.3 billion, an increase of 74% year-over-year, and annual transaction volume reached $287 billion, more than double the previous year.
“Ten years ago, we didn’t know exactly what the agent economy would look like, but we built the foundation for it. The licensing, local network integration, and payment rails that we spent 10 years building are exactly the infrastructure we needed. The new capital allows us to move quickly into Airwallex’s next chapter: autonomous finance, agent commerce, and the infrastructure that powers both.” said Jack Chan, co-founder and CEO of Airwallex.
The hike marks the moment Airwallex officially transitions its identity from a cross-border payments platform to what the company calls an AI-native financial operating system. The gap the company is targeting is real. Most companies, especially fast-growing companies, spend significant amounts of time and money on financial management that does not create a competitive advantage.
If AI can absorb that work reliably and at scale, the companies that own the underlying regulated infrastructure will sit at the center of modern business operations.
Melbourne cafe to $1.3 billion in annual revenue
Airwallex was founded in Melbourne in 2015 by Zhang, Max Li, Lucy Liu, Xijing Dai and Ki-Lok Wong. Zhang struggled to pay overseas suppliers for the coffee shop he co-owned, and found cross-border payments to be slow, expensive, and highly opaque.
Rather than building another app on top of the existing system, the founders chose to build new infrastructure underneath it. This decision required years of regulatory groundwork, but now gives Airwallex a moat that will be truly difficult to replicate. With over 85 licenses across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific, we connect directly to local payment systems in each market, rather than through correspondent banks.
The startup works by completely bypassing traditional correspondent banking networks and connecting directly to local payment rails in each market in which it operates. Its infrastructure currently supports payment acceptance, global accounts, corporate cards, spend management, and embedded financial services for more than 676,000 businesses around the world.
Over 90% of our revenue comes from customers who use multiple products. The company is co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore and has more than 2,300 employees in 27 offices.
Two products that explain where your money goes.
The most important announcement accompanying this price increase isn’t about payments. They are about what happens after payment.
The first, T:0, is an AI-native platform designed to enable companies to run complete finance functions from day one, automating bookkeeping, tax filing, compliance, forecasting, and financial reporting without requiring migration from existing systems. It is currently in private beta and will become more broadly available in the coming weeks. The name clearly articulates the ambition of a finance department that is up and running from day zero, with no setbacks or the need for human accountants.
The second, Airi, is a consumer wallet built for a world where AI agents, software that can autonomously browse, decide, and buy on your behalf, need their own payment rails. At launch, Airwallex includes one-click checkout technology that Airwallex says has increased checkout conversion success rates by up to 14% in initial testing with digital merchants.
In the coming months, we plan to expand Airi to cover agent payments, spending limits, authorization controls, and multi-currency balances, providing both merchants and AI systems with end-to-end commerce flows built on regulated infrastructure.
Taken together, these two products make a consistent argument that companies that have built the plumbing for cross-border money movement are best positioned to build the plumbing for autonomous money management.
Why competitive risk is higher than it seems
Airwallex competes with Stripe, Revolut, Wise, and Rapyd across the global payments infrastructure. However, the race he will be participating in with T:0 and Airi is a different race. The $2.75 billion Nuvei and Payoneer merger recently covered by TFN shows that infrastructure scale and depth are becoming important factors in this market. But the more important competition is which platform will become the default financial layer for agent AI.
Most AI startups that build autonomous agents do not have their own financial infrastructure. To operate, you need regulated, multi-currency, programmable payment rails that work across borders and in real-time with built-in compliance. This is what Airwallex has spent 10 years building.
A company that achieves this status will be in much the same position as Stripe was in the early e-commerce economy: the agent economy, the invisible infrastructure on which everything else runs.
“What Airwallex has built is extremely difficult to replicate. As AI transforms the competitive landscape, the winners will be the companies that build on top of, rather than around, the actual financial infrastructure. Airwallex has already shown that it can translate that foundation into meaningful software capabilities at scale,” concludes Lee Fixel of Addition, lead investor in this round.
This new funding will fund product development, regulatory expansion into new markets, and continued hiring across T:0 and Airi.
