Dive Brief:
- Airwallex, a multinational payments platform, has raised a fresh $330 million, taking its valuation to $8 billion, seven months after its last fundraising effort, the company said Monday in a press release.
- Singapore-based Airwallex also announced a new “dual global headquarters,” adding San Francisco as a base as the company seeks to capture new business opportunities in North America. Airwallex plans to spend “more than $1 billion” through 2029 to increase its U.S. operations.
- “This capital will accelerate our growth, extend our technical leadership, and strengthen our position in the U.S. and across key markets worldwide,” CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang said in the release.
Dive Insight:
U.S. expansion is a key priority for Airwallex, which in September acquired a California recurring billing startup, OpenPay, to help it better compete with Stripe and Recurly. Airwallex sells software for businesses to coordinate their financial operations, including payment processing, card issuing and expense-management tools.
In May, Airwallex said it had finished a $300 million funding effort, valuing the company at $6.2 billion at the time.
Airwallex expects a vast migration of business banking services from traditional banks to technology firms which represents “a market that’s ripe for disruption,” Shannon Scott, Airwallex’s chief product officer, said in an October interview. He also pointed to artificial intelligence as a game-changer.
“I think traditional banks are going to have a lot of trouble keeping up with the tech shifts, such as introducing AI, such as recognizing that a lot of the business process is not happening on the financial side,” he said. “I see a huge amount of white space for technology companies to disrupt incumbent financial companies.”
The U.S. corporate customer has “a really high willingness to adopt these (financial) technology services and actually sort of recognize the value of these solutions,” Scott said. “So the U.S. will be a really key market for us.”
Combined, the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Africa represent about 35% of Airwallex revenues, up from roughly zero in 2022, Zhang said last month in a blog post noting the company’s milestone in topping $1 billion in annualized revenue. The company should exceed $2 billion in annual revenue within 12 months based on its growth rate, he wrote.
The most recent funding campaign was led by the New York-based venture capital firm Addition, with other investments by Activant, Lingotto, Robinhood Ventures, TIAA Ventures and T. Rowe Price. “Airwallex is reshaping the global business banking landscape,” Addition founder Lee Fixel said in the press release.
Airwallex says about 200,000 companies use its products to manage their banking and finance operations. The company – which was founded ten years ago in Australia – has 80 licenses in Asia, North America, Europe and the Middle East.
