After taking in $300 million in funding, AI finance unicorn Airwallex makes global debut in payments AI agent finance

Image source:Airwallex

In the winter of investment and financing in the primary market, the fintech track has added another heavy financing - Airwallex, a global fintech unicorn, has recently announced the completion of $300 million in Series F financing, with a post-investment valuation of $6.2 billion. Investors include Square Peg, DST Global, Lone Pine Capital and other old shareholders, and Visa Ventures entered as a strategic investor, which means that both Visa and Mastercard are betting heavily on Airwallex.

Airwallex was founded in 2015 by four University of Melbourne alumni who encountered cross-border payment pain points in their own business, and initially entered the market with "low-cost foreign exchange + real-time cross-border payments" to help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to solve the problem of capital flow. In the past ten years, Airwallex has expanded its business from single payment to a full chain of services, including global corporate accounts, global expense management and embedded finance.

This company from Melbourne out of the establishment of 10 years cumulative financing of more than 1.2 billion U.S. dollars, the number of financing reached 11 rounds, behind the collection of Tencent, Ali, Sequoia, Gao Tail and a number of internationally renowned pension funds and other top investors.

In recent years, the global investment and financing market has continued to be cold.CB Insights data shows that the number of global investment and financing deals approached 27,000 in 2024, reaching 26,961, down 19% year-on-year, the lowest level in eight years.

In the primary market continues to be depressed environment, Airwallex completed a huge financing of $ 300 million is really not easy, its valuation can climb against the trend, some investors revealed that the investment institutions are looking at is likely to beAI AgentThere are huge prospects for growth in its scenario.

Getting into "AI Agent Finance" 

Now more teams in the industry are starting to explore AI application development, and this year is also looked at by many practitioners as the "Year of the AI Agent".

Gamma data shows that in the past year, the global AI industry financing amounted to more than 400 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of more than 77%, of which the financing of AI Agent-related startups accounted for a particularly significant proportion.

According to internal sources, like many large domestic and international companies, Airwallex has spent a lot of its internal budget on AI, and has integrated key core technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data into its products and teams. Its "AI Agentic Finance" (AI Agentic Finance), a new business category, not only to provide SaaS tools to perform financial workflow, but also to create an AI Agent that can directly complete the financial workflow for the customer's CFO, to open up the blue ocean of the hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate financial services.

Sequoia pointed out in a closed-door meeting this year that in the enterprise market, the real first run out of the entrance may not be the general big model, but Harvey (legal), Open Evidence (medical), such vertical areas of intelligent body OS, because they can understand the language of the industry and understand the real needs.

This is where Airwallex AI Agentic Finance is currently developing. According to insiders, after adopting AI Agent, AI will be present in the whole set of Airwallex workflow, no longer just a tool, but deeply integrating AI into decision-making, with the ability to understand, analyze, and solve the whole problem, and perform various finance-related tasks such as optimizing the funds management function and simplifying accounts payable. In the future, operations will be made smarter through the in-depth empowerment of AI for cash flow forecasting, tax compliance and other scenarios.

It's conceivable that while entrepreneurs put the inspiration in their heads and prepare to make a big splash, they have to rack their brains over cumbersome financial processes that get in the way of growing their business. With Airwallex's AI Agentic Finance, businesses can truly focus on their main business, saving them a great deal of money and effort. All this will enable businesses to completely smarten their money management.

The blossoming of globalization

The profitability of a business has always been a necessity for investors. Few fintech companies of Airwallex's size have been able to match its growth rate. According to the latest publicly available data, Airwallex has reached $720 million in annualized revenues in March 2025, and total revenues grew 90% year-over-year in March, further reinforcing the expectation of profitability at scale.

Today, so what's underpinning such a rapid climb in Airwallex performance?

As a cross-border payment institution, Airwallex's primary solution is the flow of funds between different countries, the settlement problem. Therefore, its globalization capability is its "winning hand" in competing in the industry.

It's worth noting that financial licenses are a core barrier to cross-border business, and Airwallex's strategy is radical: for every new market it enters, the first thing it sets up is not a commercial team, but a local compliance department. Airwallex currently holds over 60 financial licenses worldwide, covering major economies and emerging markets. With its compliance-first strategy, Airwallex has been able to quickly enter multiple markets and build a regulatory moat that is difficult for competitors to replicate.

Currently, Airwallex is a globalized company spanning 37 countries and regions with more than 1,700 employees, and its business covers mainland China and Hong Kong, Europe, North America, Southeast Asia, and so on. Along with the rise of emerging markets, Airwallex has also established a perfect business network in the Middle East, Japan, South Korea, Latin America, etc. Its business map presents a distinctive globalization characteristics + regionalization deep plowing strategy.

From an industry perspective, Airwallex's accelerated pace of "conquering cities and territories" is inextricably linked to the accelerated trend of cross-border overseas localization in recent years. Some industry insiders said that localization, on the one hand, can deepen the enterprise's insight into overseas consumers, on the other hand, cross-border service providers can also provide a variety of services closer to the habits of overseas consumers.

One of the objectives of this round of financing is also said to be to expand its global financial services infrastructure into new markets.

destabilize the banking industry

Today, the financial infrastructure of traditional banks has tended to mismatch the speed and scale of modern businesses. Cross-border transactions still rely heavily on slow, expensive and fragmented payment networks, with intermediaries, arrival delays and hidden fees, while the complexity of compliance makes global expansion costly and challenging.

"The IBM Institute for Business Value, in collaboration with the Banking Industry Architecture Network, released a report in 2024 that shows that because the needs of small and medium-sized businesses are so flexible, most traditional banking services struggle to meet their needs, making it harder for big banks to adapt. The IBM Institute for Business Value and the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIA-Network) released a report in 2024 that shows that because SMEs' banking needs are so flexible, it is difficult for most traditional banking services to meet their needs, and it is even more difficult for large banks to make practical adjustments.

In response to this state of affairs, earlier this year Airwallex co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang publicly stated, "The financial landscape is rapidly evolving and changing. The next generation of financial services infrastructure will not be limited to processing transactions - it will be embedded, automated and deeply connected to business operations."

"The traditional infrastructure of the global banking industry has become unsustainable." This public statement highlights Airwallex's ambition: to target the banking industry and fill the gap in traditional banking services.Jack said that Airwallex's vision is not to simply replace payment tools, but to fill the gaps in cross-border finance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that traditional banks have failed to serve, and to reshape the future of the banking industry.

Investors are particularly focused on Airwallex's scarce value as a financial services platform for global SMEs, a capability that is currently very scarce for banks. An investor close to the deal revealed, "Traditional banks are limited by costs and focus mainly on large customer services, but SMEs' cross-border financial needs have long been ignored, creating a $100 billion incremental market." It is reported that by 2027, the potential market size of financial services for globally operating businesses reaches US$570 billion.

Specifically, Airwallex is currently reducing service costs through its digital platform and automated processes, providing global SMEs with efficient one-stop solutions for international payments, foreign exchange management and other services, and creating differentiated competitiveness. This not only helps customers to cope with the current tariff challenges, but also enables global SMEs to obtain the same financial capabilities as large multinational enterprises through the continuous innovation of the product matrix, forming the financial empowerment of "inclusive globalization".

According to an unnamed industry insider's comment, "The key support for the current valuation of AirCloudHub lies in the scarcity of technology-driven positioning and the irreplaceability of its business model. Through technological innovation, service model reconstruction and precise demand matching, it may gradually replace the dominant position of traditional banks in the cross-border payment field of SMEs."

Faced with multiple challenges, Airwallex has set 2026 as a critical point for IPO readiness.Jack Zhang made it clear: "We want to be ready to go public in 2026, but not for the sake of going public."

The story of Airwallex's financing can also be interpreted as a "strategic upgrade" as it transforms its role from a "cross-border payment institution" to a "banking service". After the label of "cross-border payment institution" is removed, the real test may have just begun - after all, in the world's oldest industry, the destiny of the disruptor is often either to become the definer of the new rules, or to become a footnote to the old system.