Jack Zhang

Stripe offered to acquire us for $1.2 billion when we had $2M in revenue.

Today, we've raised $330M at an $8B valuation and reached $1B ARR.

We could've died three times during this journey.

This is the story I've never told anyone before:

At 16, I lost all financial support.

I moved to Australia at 15. But a year later, my family lost everything.

I couldn't go back home so I had to find a way to pay my tuition fees of $24,000 on my own.

So I worked every job I could find.

12 hours a day at the Lemon factory when it was 40°C.

During college, I'd bartend from 4 pm to midnight, then work overnight at the petrol station. I'd do it for 4-5 days a week while studying computer science.

But I never stopped coding.

While running a small coffee business, I realized how broken it was to pay suppliers internationally.

That's when I asked questions which later became Airwallex.

Why can't money move like data? If data moves in seconds, why does money take weeks?

One day, I met Lucy in our coffee shop.

I told her I was starting a company to fix global payments. She said that she would invest $1M for 20%.

The crazy part was that I hadn't even registered the company yet and was still working at an investment bank.

Lucy was 24 & had never inv

But then in 2016, we almost died.

After signing our term sheet, a VC called me a week later.

"I don't think this algorithm thing will work. We're pulling out."

We almost ran out of money.

In 2017, we almost died again.

We had raised our Series A from Mastercard and Tencent and they were supposed to be our anchor customers.

They promised massive volume &amp; we built the entire product for them.

But when we launched, they delivered less than 1% of what they promised

Then came 2018 when Stripe wanted to acquire Airwallex for $1.2 billion.

We had $2M in revenue so Stripe was offering us a 600x multiple.

I would've made over $2 billion personally (valued by latest Stripe shares).

But the team said no.

You see, when we were talking, Patrick said something that stuck with me:

"I'm building Stripe for the next 20, 30, 40 years."

I realized that's what I wanted too. In fact, 90% people at the company wanted to keep building.

But then we almost died for the third time.

When we were closing our Series D, COVID hit and the US stock market crashed 30% in a single week.

Our revenue dropped 40%. Everyone from tuition customers to travel customers vanished overnight.

From 2021 to 2025, the business finally took off.

Our revenue scaled from $100M ARR to $1B ARR in 4 years and we stopped 'almost dying'.

We grew our teams and expanded in North America &amp; Europe, and matured our product from just infrastructure to software, and now AI agents.

North America &amp; Europe have become a real growth engine for Airwallex, with 4-year revenue CAGR of &gt;250%.

Now we process over $235B in payments a year globally.

And today, we raised $330 million which valued us at $8 billion.

For 10 years, I almost never posted and never talked about our growth.

Investors would ask: "Why don't you tell people what you're building?"

But I didn't have a good answer.

In Australia, you keep your head down and let the work speak for itself.

But being invisible has a price.

Recruiting is harder, customers don't know we exist, and competitors with half our scale get 10x the attention.

So we sponsored McLaren F1, who've won the Constructors championship twice since our partnership.

We also sponsored Arsenal.

Airwallex isn't just a cross border payments company anymore.

We're building the end-to-end financial operating system for global business. That includes:

• Infrastructure, software, and AI agents
• And autonomous finance

That's the next decade.

Its never about the $ .. you can change the world

the reason is not about how big it will become, its about I can live only my 30s once in my life and i want to make the most of it

We are not bigger than Stripe.. but we will there.