I spent way too long researching how Airwallex went from a coffee side-hustle to an $8B fintech beast (just raised $330M). Here’s what I learned…

I’ve been obsessed with these insane fintech growth stories lately and Airwallex absolutely blew my mind. These guys started in a tiny Melbourne office in 2015 because they were sick of getting destroyed by bank fees while importing coffee equipment for their cafe. Fast forward to last week and they just closed a $330M round at an $8B valuation, with a second HQ in San Francisco and plans for a 2026 IPO. That’s up from $6.2B only a few months ago.

The wildest part? Back in 2018 when they were doing maybe $2M in revenue, Stripe offered $1.2B to buy them. The five founders took a vote over WhatsApp and said no (yes over whatsapp). That decision alone has 7x’d since then.

I went down the rabbit hole and pieced together the whole story from their blog posts, investor updates, Contrary Research, The Generalist, AFR articles, etc. No insider stuff, just public info. Here’s the quick version:

It all started because Jack Zhang (CEO) and the team were running a little cafe called Tukk & Co and kept losing their margins to terrible FX rates, slow transfers, and hidden fees. Jack had already made decent money flipping real estate and trading algo stuff, so he recruited his uni friends Lucy Liu (ex-investment banking), Jacob Dai (CTO), and a couple others, threw in their own cash (Lucy put in a full million), and started building.
Early idea was some P2P currency swap thing but it flopped hard. They pivoted fast to B2B cross-border infrastructure and never looked back. Perfect timing too: e-commerce exploding, remote teams everywhere, everyone suddenly needed to pay suppliers and contractors across borders without getting robbed.

Today they’ve got 150,000+ customers (Canva, Deel, McLaren, etc), process $235B in payments a year (73% growth), just crossed $1B ARR with 90% growth, and they’re cash-flow positive. They built their own payment rails so 95% of payouts land same-day, they issue Visa cards everywhere, do treasury, yield on idle cash, embedded finance APIs, the whole package. Free to start, make money on the markup and cards. Super sticky once companies add the cards and expenses.

They’ve been on a land-grab spree: 80+ payment licenses, offices all over, just bought a company to enter Mexico and Brazil, and now they’re going hard on the US because awareness is still low there even though revenue is growing 300-400% in the Americas.

Culture seems intense (Jack apparently coded 20-hour days in the beginning and they had some burnout issues in 2023), but they fixed engagement scores and keep hiring like crazy (1700+ people now).

Takeaways that actually hit me:

– Saying no to a life-changing acquisition when everyone thinks you’re nuts can pay off huge if you truly believe in the vision
– Owning the infrastructure instead of reselling someone else’s gives you real margins and speed
– Start in one strong region (APAC for them) then use the cash flow to attack everywhere else
– Bundling a bunch of “free” products that all feed each other is brutal for retention
– Real founder-market fit matters: they lived the exact pain they’re solving

Anyway, that’s the story that’s been living rent-free in my head all week.
Anyone else building in fintech or payments? Was turning down Stripe genius or reckless? Would love to hear your takes.

(If anyone wants the sources I’ll drop links in the comments, happy to share)