Anika Begay
Airwallex, which was most recently valued at $5.5 billion and is backed by Tencent, has been tipped as one of several leading fintech IPO candidates.
José Sarmento | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Ten hundredthPayments startup Airwallex is approaching $500 million in annual revenue and will aim to prepare for an initial public offering by 2026, CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang told Vscek in an exclusive interview.
“I think the next big milestone is $1 billion. We hope to hit it in 2026 or 2027. That’s the goal,” Zhang said, in response to a question about what the future holds for the Singapore-based company after hitting the $500 million ARR milestone.
Run rate is a rough measure of how much revenue a company will make in a single year, based on monthly performance.
Zhang said Airwallex has seen significant growth in its business over the past year, driven by expansion into developed markets such as the UK, Europe and North America.
According to data shared with Vscek, in the Americas region, Airwallex increased its revenue by more than 300% year-over-year.
According to Zhang, the UK, Europe and North America now account for more than 35% of Airwallex’s total trading volume.
When asked by Vscek what he thought about the prospect of an IPO for his business, Zhang said, “For us, it’s just about being ready for an IPO in the next couple of years, so we have the choice whether or not to do it.”
“In 2025 we will prepare everything and after 2026 we will decide what to do,” he added.
Airwallex surpassed $100 billion in annual payment processing volumes this year, Zhang said, marking a 73% increase from last year. This came as the company saw volumes grow across all its products, including payments, foreign exchange, settlements and issuance.
“It took us nine years to break the $100 billion market,” Zhang said. “I hope it takes no less than a year to get to $200 billion.
Using “AI Workers” to Cut Costs
Zhang added that Airwallex is not prioritizing annual net profit given its current growth rate, but the company is looking for ways to keep costs low. AI, he said, has helped Airwallex make its employees more productive, which has also led to cost savings.
For example, he said Airwallex is experimenting with 11x, a company that offers other companies access to digital “AI workers” to replace a significant portion of their sales development representatives (SDRs), staff who focus on managing sales leads.
The experiment was only recently launched, he said, but Zhang is so confident about adopting AI agents to do the day-to-day work of SDRs that he thinks they could replace up to 70% of such employees within Airwallex.
He stressed that while some roles will indeed be replaced by AI, most will be augmented by technology, as Airwallex sales teams will be able to do more with less.
Airwallex, which was recently valued at $5.5 billion and is backed by Tencent, has been tipped as one of several leading fintech IPO candidates. But Zhang said the mood in the fintech sector is still mostly sour for now.
“Investor sentiment is still not great and is still conservative,” Zhang told Vscek. “This has been going on for about three years. Nothing has changed that much.”
However, he added: “Financial technology is a very large market. You see big companies like Nubank, Revolut, Stripe, Adyen continuing to be very successful.”
“Investors will continue to choose the right companies to invest in. We just need to make sure that Airwallex is the number one global payments in the financial space,” Zhang said.
