If you get close enough to find it, Stripe and Airwallex are now following each other

Jack Zhang was 34 years old, three and a half years to start, and sitting next to one of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley. Sequoia’s Michael Moritz invited him to his home — a place, Zhang recalls, several floors up and looking directly at the Golden Gate Bridge — to make a sales case.

Stripe wanted to buy Airwallex for $1.2 billion. At the time, the Melbourne company had an annual turnover of about $2 million. The math was almost indisputable: a sum of money somewhere around 600 times. Patrick Collison, Moritz argued, was the inventor of the genealogy. This agreement can “merge” into something unusual. Zhang obeyed. He walked around San Francisco for two weeks, restless, unable to think clearly. At one point, he said yes.

Then they set off on a journey of about 8,000 kilometers back home.

“I went deep into what inspired me to create Airwallex,” he said earlier this week, speaking to an editor from abroad. “I’ve been in business for three and a half years. The business is growing 100 times in 2018. And I just got a taste of what (it was) like to be an entrepreneur. And that’s what I dreamed of.”

Two-thirds of the founders voted against the deal, which helped. But he says the clearest sign came from looking at the whiteboard in his office. The vision was still there, never ending: to build a financial infrastructure that would allow any business to operate anywhere in the world as if it were a local company.

That choice seems very good. Airwallex now has over $1.3 billion in annual revenue and is growing at 85% year over year. It approaches nearly $300 billion in annual sales. Nothing has come easy – and Zhang argues that’s the point.

It’s a passion that goes much deeper than business strategy. Zhang grew up in Qingdao, a port city in northeastern China, and moved to Melbourne at the age of 15 without her parents, who spoke no English, living with a host family. When his family’s finances collapsed, he worked four jobs to put himself through a computer science degree at the University of Melbourne, according to the Australian Financial Review – bartending, washing dishes, working in a graveyard at a gas station, picking lemons on a farm during school holidays, which he has called the hardest job he’s ever had. He spent years writing commercial code in the front office of an Australian investment bank, a job that was well-paid and vaguely “very satisfying.”

Before Airwallex, he started about 10 businesses: a magazine at the age of 14, a real estate company, an export service that transports wine and olive oil from Australia to Asia, textiles to the other side, a burger chain.

He was running a coffee shop in Melbourne when the idea for Airwallex started. While trying to pay coffee bean sellers in Brazil, Indonesia, and Guatemala, co-founder Max Li kept the missing money in bank accounts – which had been frozen and frozen by American banks that enforced OFAC sanctions, sometimes returning weeks after being sent. “This made me look at how banks work,” Zhang said, “how SWIFT works, and how we can build our global financial system.”

It’s still an idea, it’s just gotten bigger. Airwallex now has about 90 financial licenses in 50 markets. Zhang says Stripe has about half that number. Obtaining these certificates has taken a very long time – in Japan alone, the process took seven years. In some emerging markets, the company had to find shell companies whose licenses are no longer granted by central banks, and rebuild the technology under them entirely.

“You can’t coordinate with the central bank of Mexico,” Zhang said. “We need to have a secure room – you have to do a biometric scan to get in to connect with the central bank.”

The purpose of having these licenses is not to change the window. In Japan, for example, Stripe and Square can process payments, but they must transfer money to the merchant’s bank account immediately. Airwallex, with an investment management license, can keep the investment within its environment. This means that the customer can open bank accounts, issue cards, and spend money without leaving the platform.

The economics of foreign exchange alone are high: a US merchant setting up an investment in Australian dollars avoids the 2% to 3% interest that processors like Stripe charge them to convert to US dollars – and can use local banks to pay local vendors, pay salaries, and pay for digital advertising, all at inter-bank rates.

“You no longer operate as a US company,” Zhang said. “You operate as a company that has subsidiaries all over the world, but you don’t have to set up those subsidiaries.”

The slow build was intentional, and Zhang has a plan he often returns to: “the most critical approach.” Every license, including every bank, every local payment rail that Airwallex has carefully assembled has created a layer that makes it difficult to compete with them. “It took us six and a half years to reach $100 million a year,” Zhang said. “But after that, it took just over three years to reach a billion.”

The concept of competition, in its definition, comes down to the most basic thing which means having an infrastructure against the rise of another. If you’re not managing an end-to-end payment system and something goes wrong, you won’t be able to find the bottom line to report to your customer. You cannot add new items on top of someone else’s stack. “Building on top of other materials,” he said, “is not possible.”

Throughout its existence, Airwallex and Stripe have operated in different environments, and sold to different consumers. That’s a change. As Stripe pushes deeper into international markets, and Airwallex moves into the United States, the merger is growing.

The buyer of Airwallex has been the history of the CFO office in Australia and Southeast Asia, where the company is already well established – financial managers, treasury groups – which puts it in a different commercial motion than Stripe, whose customer purchase has been very obsessed with US developers choosing the starting point of the new company’s infidelity. Over 90% of Airwallex customers first land on a business account, and payments and cash management follow from there. More than half are using multiple products, Zhang says.

However, there are problems that Zhang does not try to minimize. The big one would be that Stripe is the golden child of Silicon Valley, its private equity holdings are multi-millionaires across the tech industry. Another thing is the difference in the type you have. Airwallex needs to position itself in the minds of engineers and designers – not just finance teams – so that startups can naturally approach it. “Our mark has not yet been reached,” he said. “This is a very difficult race to win.”

It is a competition that is being watched with interest from different places. Sequoia backed Airwallex early on – although the deal was made through Sequoia Capital China, which was spun off and renamed Hongshan – and remains one of the company’s biggest stakes. Investment firm Greenoaks Capital also works in both companies. Zhang ignored any misgivings about the overlapping tables. Investors, he said, are betting on the big market.

However, it raises the question of cost. Stripe was expensive $159 billion by issuing tenders in February – up 74% from the previous year – after planning $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025. Airwallex, provided $8 billion price in December, is worth about twenty of them. But according to Zhang, Stripe’s payout ratio is about six times that of Airwallex, not 20 times. With an annual growth of 85% and a projected revenue of $2 billion within the next year, Airwallex is closing the economic gap faster than the calculations would indicate.

Whether the market finally sees it is another question — which IPO, which Zhang says is about three to five years away, can force to go public.

For now, Zhang says he’s focused on long-term goals: a million customers by 2030, $20 billion a year, revenue per customer growing from about $12,000 to $13,000 today to about $20,000. A class of autonomous financial products powered by AI — agents that don’t just display information but perform transactions — is starting now. The idea is that a decade of finance in all aspects of corporate finance, from fundraising to asset management to vendor payments and expenses, has produced lessons that no competitor can explain overnight, he says.

Now to see if all that hard work is enough to eat up Stripe’s market share. For now, the competition seems to be taking place at a distance. Zhang and Collison weren’t friends, but they were friendly when the talks were going on years ago. Last year, Zhang and Collison were both at Greenoaks Capital’s annual meeting. They did not speak.