Inside Our Airwallex Investment: Why B2B Banking Infrastructure Wins

Their approach to building is exactly what the market needs

After 20 years building fintech at major financial institutions, I've moved to the venture side.

But I still ask myself: What would I build today if I were back in the founder seat?

Without hesitation, my answer is this: a global B2B fintech platform designed to serve companies that have outgrown their domestic markets and are expanding internationally.

This isn't just theoretical. For nearly 80 years, financial institutions have been at the forefront of international expansion, opening doors and enabling businesses to follow. Banks were the enablers of global business. That dynamic has fundamentally changed.

Over the last several years, globalization has slowed and in some sectors reversed. Banks, once the champions of cross-border commerce, have pulled back.

Faced with rising compliance burdens, challenges in anti-money laundering (AML) efforts, and constrained by outdated infrastructure, many institutions have reduced or shut down their international operations entirely.

For today's fast-growing businesses, this retreat has created a large gap. It's now harder than ever to find a trusted financial partner to support cross-border growth. And this gap is exactly when builders step forward.

The Infrastructure Problem

Building a new kind of financial institution isn't low-hanging fruit. It's brutally difficult work. The founder who takes this on must be patient, innovative, and relentlessly customer-focused.

And you can't solve this with a single piece of tech. You need a flexible, resilient, and deeply integrated platform that can adapt to rapidly changing local environments while forging partnerships with both global and regional players.

This new bank must be able to process large volumes of transactions in real time, rapidly launch new products tailored to local needs, and achieve near-total automation.

It needs to be cost-efficient, scalable, and compliant in dozens of jurisdictions. Most challenging of all, it must be simultaneously hyper-global and hyper-local.

However, what matters most is that it must serve businesses the way they actually operate, not the way legacy banks think they should operate.

The Company That Built the Rails: AirWallex

While exploring this space, we came across Airwallex. A company that has managed to check nearly every one of these boxes.

Jack Zhang's approach was methodical and infrastructure-first. As he puts it: "We spent nearly a decade taking a deep, hyper-local approach: going country by country, forming partnerships, gaining local insight, and establishing direct connections. We grew from a single license in Australia to more than 60 globally."

This wasn't glamorous work. They built direct relationships with card schemes like Visa and Mastercard, becoming a principal issuer and acquirer wherever possible, meeting rigorous regulatory and operational requirements.

They established real-time or near real-time money movement across 150+ countries, secured interbank FX rates in 60+ currencies, and created infrastructure that saves customers up to 80% on FX fees.

The result was a platform that enables multi-currency, hyper-local eCommerce checkout experiences anywhere in the world.

Beyond Infrastructure: The Full Stack

But Airwallex didn't stop at building rails. They recognized that infrastructure alone doesn't create a business. As Jack learned early on: "Infrastructure is like the railways. You still need a train to carry stuff on the rails to make money."

Building on their foundational infrastructure, they've created what Jack calls "a tightly integrated software stack that works seamlessly across currencies and borders to power the lifecycle of global financial services."

This includes comprehensive spend management, high-interest multicurrency accounts, and APIs designed to support the financial operations of their largest customers.

The transformation is remarkable: "Just a few years ago, most of our business came from our cross-border infrastructure. Today, we're powering a much greater portion of our customers' financial operations."

The AI-Powered Future

What excites me most about Airwallex's vision is their understanding of where this is all heading. Jack sees a future where "AI can run the entire finance function. Not just co-pilot mode, but fully autonomous financial operations."

This isn't just about automation. It's about fundamentally changing how companies are built, funded, and scaled. When financial operations become truly autonomous, it removes one of the biggest operational burdens from growing businesses, allowing them to focus entirely on their core value proposition.

Why We Invested: The Founder Factor

AirWallex’s numbers are impressive. $720M in annualized revenue with 90% year-over-year growth, operating in 30+ countries, serving 150,000+ global business customers.

But numbers don't tell the whole story. Jack Zhang's journey does.

When someone arrives in a foreign country at 15 with no money, no language skills, and no support system, then builds a company that nearly dies with six weeks of runway left, then turns down $1.2 billion from Stripe because they see something bigger, you pay attention.

Jack didn't just turn down an acquisition. He turned down the easy path. He chose to solve the harder problem, to build infrastructure that actually serves global businesses rather than taking the quick exit. That's conviction. That's the kind of founder you bet on.

The Stripe acquisition offer came after just two years of real product development. As Jack reflects: "I only started to taste the scale, the success, the fun part of building a startup. It's only two years of feeling the winning... I want to keep building."

What This Means for B2B Banking

Airwallex represents more than just a successful fintech company. It's a preview of what business banking becomes when you start from scratch with no legacy infrastructure to maintain, no regulatory capture to navigate, and no old assumptions about how businesses should operate.

Their approach to building is exactly what the market needs. Growing international companies don't just need payments or FX. They need one platform for their entire financial footprint across borders. One window. One dashboard. One partner.

Traditional banks aren't going away overnight, but their retreat from international business creates an opening for something better. Something designed for how businesses actually work in 2025, not how they worked in 1995.

For the next generation of globally ambitious companies—the ones that will shape the economy over the next decade—Airwallex is becoming the go-to partner. They're not just processing transactions; they're enabling global commerce at a scale and sophistication that legacy institutions simply can't match.

The Frontier

The frontier isn't gone. It just looks different now. Instead of claiming territory, it's claiming problems that others won't solve.

Jack Zhang saw this frontier when he was a teenager with no resources. He's still seeing it now as the CEO of a $6.2 billion company. That vision is why we invested.

The old system is retreating. The builders are advancing. And Airwallex is leading the charge.