Airwallex

About Airwallex

Airwallex is the Australian payments story everyone in the industry knows. Five founders — Jack Zhang, Max Li, Lucy Liu, Xijing Dai and Ki-lok Wong — started it in Melbourne in 2015 after running a cafe and getting sick of what cross-border payments were costing them. It hit a billion-dollar valuation inside four years, faster than any Australian startup before it, and kept climbing: US$5.5 billion in 2021, US$6.2 billion in May 2025, US$8 billion by December 2025. It says annual recurring revenue passed US$1 billion in October 2025. The Australian centre of gravity has shifted since — in 2025 it moved to a dual-headquarters setup across Singapore and San Francisco — but Melbourne is still the Australian base, with a Sydney office added in July 2023.

For most of its life here it has not been a terminal company at all. It is multi-currency business accounts, international transfers, FX, corporate cards and online payments — what an importer or an online retailer deals with, not a cafe. Its Australian and New Zealand customers as at July 2023 included Kogan, Freelancer.com, Culture Kings, Camilla, Stake, Mr Yum, Employment Hero and Qantas, around 15,000 in the region with roughly 200 staff in Australia. It is regulated here by ASIC under AFSL 487221. In January 2026 AUSTRAC ordered an external auditor appointed to assess its anti-money-laundering compliance, saying it was concerned the transaction monitoring program had not been attuned to the full range of risks; Airwallex said it has zero tolerance for financial crime and would cooperate fully.

The in-person side is brand new and worth knowing about if you are comparing card acceptance. Airwallex beta-tested a point-of-sale product in Hong Kong and Singapore through 2025 and started rolling it out globally — an Android countertop and handheld terminal it calls the M90, plus a SoftPOS app for phones and tablets. The pitch is one platform for in-store and online with a single set of reporting, instead of a different acquirer in every country. Its own Australian point-of-sale page still has it marked coming soon here, so right now you can run your online and cross-border payments through Airwallex, but a counter terminal from them is not yet a live option in Australia.