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Airwallex Revenue Growth
Annualized revenue growth trajectory of Airwallex
Primary Sources
Airwallex is about to take on Stripe and the rest of the payments industry — in the physical world | TechCrunch
Airwallex, the Australian fintech that has spent a decade quietly building global payments infrastructure, is moving into in-person payments. The move deepens its rivalry with Stripe across the payments stack, and enables the startup to directly aim at Square and Adyen on one of the last major battlegrounds in financial technology. Airwallex is launching a point-of-sale product that it says does something its rivals’ offerings don’t: Allow businesses to accept in-person payments in multiple countries via a single platform, without onboarding local vendors in every market. “When a business expands into a new market, they typically have to onboard a new local acquirer, navigate fragmented compliance, and manage yet another set of vendor relationships,” CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang told TechCrunch. In 2019, Stripe offered to acquire Airwallex for $1.2 billion, when Airwallex had just $2 million in revenue. But Zhang decided to keep building. “I even said yes to the deal,” he said, recalling the months-long negotiation. “But what really got me to change my mind is when I actually flew back to Melbourne and went deep on what motivated me to build Airwallex.” Zhang founded Airwallex in 2015 out of frustration with the friction and expense of moving money internationally, but took a different approach than most fintech: He spent years assembling its own underlying payment rails. Today, Airwallex, valued at $8 billion by its investors, claims it generates annualized revenue of about $1.3 billion, and that the number is growing by roughly 85% every year. The startup says it now serves more than 46,000 U.S. businesses and processes $100 billion in annual volume. The startup currently boasts close to 90 regulatory licenses across roughly 50 markets, direct connections to local payment networks in over 120 countries, and the ability to settle transactions in more than 90 currencies. It is the very infrastructure, Zhang says, that Stripe and Square lack in meaningful ways — particularly the local banking licenses that allow funds to be held, converted, and deployed within a given market rather than immediately repatriated. Techcrunch event San Francisco, CA | October 13-15, 2026 “Stripe and Square can process payments in Japan,” he said, “but when you actually process the payment, you need to immediately pay out to the merchant’s bank account. You can’t hold the funds.” Airwallex’s license in Japan — which took seven years to obtain — enables it to do exactl...
Airwallex Launches POS to Challenge Stripe’s Offline Payments Dominance
Airwallex has launched its own point-of-sale (POS) solution, signaling a major expansion beyond its core cross-border payments infrastructure. This move puts it in direct competition with Stripe’s growing physical payments ecosystem, marking a new phase in the battle for omnichannel commerce. By combining online and offline capabilities, Airwallex is positioning itself as a full-stack financial platform for global businesses. The launch reflects a broader trend of fintechs moving deeper into merchant operations to capture more value. It also highlights how the line between payments, banking, and software continues to blur. For merchants, this could mean more integrated and cost-efficient solutions. Ultimately, the POS war is heating up—and fintech challengers are no longer staying in their lanes.SourceMost people still think tokenized deposits are a crypto story. But I would say they are a banking infrastructure upgrade.Tokenized deposits are simply commercial bank money represented on a blockchain. The key difference is not what they are, but how they move. They enable 24/7, near real-time settlement with programmable logic, while remaining fully within the regulated banking system.____This is why banks are leading, not being disrupted.Unlike stablecoins, tokenized deposits are direct liabilities of banks, backed by existing deposits, covered by deposit insurance, and governed by the same regulatory frameworks. They preserve the two-tier monetary system instead of bypassing it.____The shift is already operational, not theoretical.J.P. Morgan, Citi, and BNY are running live systems for institutional clients. Corporates are using them for treasury automation, FX, and liquidity management. Transactions that used to take hours or days are executed instantly and programmatically across time zones.____The real change is structural.-> Settlement is collapsing into the same layer as execution.-> Money becomes programmable.-> Liquidity becomes continuous instead of batch-based.This matters because most inefficiencies in finance come from fragmentation between ledgers, intermediaries, and settlement cycles.Tokenized deposits remove that fragmentation without removing banks. They also redefine the relationship with stablecoins.Stablecoins dominate open, permissionless environments, but tokenized deposits dominate regulated, institutional flows. Both coexist, but they serve different layers of the system.____The strategic implication is straightforward.Tokenized depo...
Airwallex Challenges Stripe With Global In-Person Payment Solution
The move marks a significant expansion for Airwallex, which has primarily focused on cross-border digital payments and financial infrastructure. By entering the physical payments space, the company is targeting one of the last major areas still ...
Why did Airwallex's CEO reject a $1.2 billion acquisition offer from Stripe?
This strategic move intensifies its competition with industry giants like Stripe while positioning it to directly challenge Square and Adyen in one of the few remaining battlegrounds within the financial technology sector. Airwallex launches a point-of-sale product to facilitate cross-border payments. The company has built a robust global payments infrastructure over the past decade.
