- Airwallex raises $320M at an $11B valuation, up from $8B just six months ago.
- Revenue hit $1.3B annualised in March 2026, up 74% year-on-year.
- New AI products T:0 and Airi aim to automate finance teams and agentic payments.
Airwallex has closed a $320 million Series H round that values the global payments company at $11 billion, up from $8 billion just six months ago, and is using the capital to build AI systems capable of running a company’s entire finance 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.
It arrives on the back of the company’s strongest operating numbers yet: in March 2026, Airwallex reached $1.3 billion in annualised revenue, up 74% year-on-year, and $287 billion in annualised transaction volume, more than double the prior year.
“A decade ago, we did not know exactly what the agentic economy would look like, but we built a foundation for it. The licences, local network integrations, and settlement rails we spent ten years constructing are precisely the kind of infrastructure it needs. This new capital lets us move faster into Airwallex’s next chapter: autonomous finance, agentic commerce, and the infrastructure to power both,” says Jack Zhang, Airwallex’s co-founder and chief executive.
The raise marks the moment Airwallex formally shifts its identity,from a cross-border payments platform into what it is calling an AI-native financial operating system. The gap it is targeting is real: most businesses, particularly fast-growing ones, spend enormous time and money on financial administration that produces no competitive advantage.
If AI can absorb that work reliably and at scale, the company that owns the regulated infrastructure underneath it will sit at the centre of how modern businesses run.
From a Melbourne café to $1.3B in annualised revenue
Airwallex was founded in Melbourne in 2015 by Zhang, Max Li, Lucy Liu, Xijing Dai, and Ki-Lok Wong, after Zhang struggled to pay overseas suppliers for a coffee shop he co-owned and found that cross-border payments were slow, expensive, and maddeningly opaque.
Rather than build another app on top of the existing system, the founders chose to construct new infrastructure beneath it. That decision took years of regulatory groundwork but now gives Airwallex a moat that is genuinely difficult to replicate: more than 85 licences across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, with direct connections into local clearing systems in each market rather than routing through correspondent banks..
The startups works by plugging directly into local payment rails in each market it operates, bypassing the traditional correspondent banking network entirely. That infrastructure now supports payment acceptance, global accounts, corporate cards, spend management, and embedded financial services for more than 676,000 businesses worldwide.
More than 90% of its revenue comes from customers using more than one product. The company is co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, and employs more than 2,300 people across 27 offices.
Two products that explain where the money is going
The most significant announcements accompanying this raise are not about payments. They are about what comes after payments.
The first, T:0, is an AI-native platform designed to run a company’s full finance function from the day it is incorporated, automating bookkeeping, tax filing, compliance, forecasting, and financial reporting without requiring migration from any existing system. It is currently in private beta, with broader availability expected in the coming weeks. The name signals the ambition clearly: a finance department that is operational from day zero, with no setup lag and no human accountant required.
The second, Airi, is a consumer wallet built for a world where AI agents, software capable of browsing, deciding, and purchasing autonomously on a user’s behalf , need their own payment rails. At launch, Airi incorporates one-click checkout technology that Airwallex says lifted successful checkout conversions by up to 14% in early testing with digital merchants.
Over the coming months, it plans to extend Airi to cover delegated agent payments, spending limits, permission controls, and multi-currency balances, giving both merchants and AI systems an end-to-end commerce flow built on regulated infrastructure.
Together, the two products make a coherent argument: the company that built the plumbing for cross-border money movement is best placed to build the plumbing for autonomous money management.
Why the competitive stakes are higher than they look
Airwallex competes with Stripe, Revolut, Wise, and Rapyd across global payments infrastructure. But the race it is entering with T:0 and Airi is a different one. The $2.75 billion Nuvei-Payoneer merger, recently covered by TFN, illustrated that scale and depth of infrastructure are becoming table stakes in this market. The more consequential contest, however, has barely started: which platform becomes the default financial layer for agentic AI.
Most AI startups building autonomous agents have no financial infrastructure of their own. They need regulated, multi-currency, programmable payment rails to operate, and those rails must work across borders, in real time, with compliance built in. That is precisely what Airwallex has spent a decade constructing.
The company that wins this position will sit in the agentic economy roughly where Stripe sat in the early e-commerce economy: invisible infrastructure that everything else runs on.
“What Airwallex has built is unusually hard to replicate. As AI transforms the competitive landscape, the winners will be the companies building on top of real financial infrastructure, not around it. Airwallex has already shown it can translate that foundation into meaningful software capabilities at scale,” concludes Lee Fixel of Addition, the round’s lead investor.
The new capital will fund product development across T:0 and Airi, regulatory expansion into new markets, and continued hiring.
