How Airwallex turned a $1 million investment into $8 billion
In 2018, Stripe offered to buy fintech company Airwallex for $1.2 billion. They said no. Seven years later, the company is worth $8 billion and serves over 200,000 customers globally.
Jack Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Airwallex, helped build one of the world’s fastest-growing fintech companies, now valued at $8 billion and generating more than $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.
Born in Qingdao, China, Zhang moved to Australia alone at 15. When his family’s finances collapsed, he worked 16-hour days in factories, restaurants and petrol stations to pay his tuition — a work ethic that later shaped his entrepreneurial push.
After making millions from side businesses in his 20s, Zhang felt unfulfilled. A frustrating payment issue at his Melbourne coffee shop led him and a group of friends to identify a larger problem: slow, expensive international transfers built on outdated infrastructure. In 2015, they founded Airwallex to rebuild cross-border payments from the ground up.
Just three years later, Irish-American financial services company Stripe offered to acquire Airwallex for $1.2 billion, but the founders turned the offer down. The years that followed brought turbulence, including fraud losses and Covid-related revenue hits.
Watch the video above to learn about how Jack Zhang and the Airwallex team recovered from that tumultuous period.
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