Airwallex raises $320M at $11B valuation to push into AI finance

Airwallex is building an AI-native financial operating system to challenge Stripe and Ramp in the $1.3 trillion global payments market.

Airwallex raised $320 million at an $11 billion valuation, pushing into AI-driven autonomous finance as the Melbourne-founded fintech takes on Stripe and Ramp in corporate payments.

"What Airwallex has built is unusually hard to replicate," Lee Fixel, founder of Addition, which led the round, said. "As AI transforms the competitive landscape, the winners will be the companies building on top of real financial infrastructure, not around it."

The company reached $1.3 billion in annualized revenue in March, up 74% from a year earlier, and processed $287 billion in annualized transaction volume, more than double the prior year. More than 90% of revenue comes from customers using multiple Airwallex products, the company said. Airwallex now serves 676,000 businesses across 47 countries and holds 85 money-movement licenses worldwide.

The raise comes as Airwallex expands beyond cross-border payments into corporate cards, bank accounts and AI-native finance tools. Its new products — T:0, an autonomous finance platform, and Airi, a wallet for agentic commerce — aim to give CFOs a single platform for bookkeeping, forecasting, compliance and payments. Stripe, which processed $1.9 trillion in payments last year, offered to buy Airwallex for $1.2 billion in 2018, Zhang said. Ramp now handles $200 billion in annualized purchase volume.

T:0 and Airi Target the CFO Stack

T:0 automates bookkeeping, forecasting, taxes and compliance from a company's founding, Airwallex said. The product is in private beta and will launch more widely in coming weeks. Airi, the company's agentic consumer wallet, incorporates one-click checkout that has delivered up to a 14% increase in successful conversions for digital merchants in early testing. Both products sit on Airwallex's regulated infrastructure of 85 licenses across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Regulatory Scrutiny and Competitive Pressure

Airwallex faces headwinds beyond competition. In December, Khosla Ventures managing director Keith Rabois, who sits on Ramp's board, alleged on X that Airwallex sends U.S. customer data to China. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton later called for a Treasury investigation. Airwallex commissioned a security assessment from cybersecurity firm Coalfire, which found its access restrictions "go beyond minimum expectations." Separately, Australia's anti-money-laundering regulator AUSTRAC began an audit of Airwallex in January for suspected compliance failures, which Zhang said is part of an industry-wide regulatory push.

Airwallex is not yet profitable, but its revenue growth — from $2 million in 2018 to a $1.3 billion run rate — shows the scale of the opportunity in cross-border payments. The company is also incubating Metal, a blockchain for tokenized financial products, which Zhang expects could help process stablecoin payments making up 5% to 10% of global money movement within a decade. Stripe launched its own payments blockchain, Tempo, in March.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.