Melbourne-founded fintech Airwallex has raised $460 million (US$320 million) in a Series H round that values the cross-border payments company at $16 billion (US$11 billion), a 37 per cent jump that lands even as the business works through an anti-money-laundering audit ordered by Australia’s financial intelligence regulator.
The round was led by existing backer Addition, the New York firm founded by Lee Fixel, according to Startup Daily. It was joined by Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia, Haun Ventures, Washington University in St. Louis and American Express’s venture arm, Amex Ventures.
Australian venture firms Blackbird, Square Peg and Airtree remain on the register. Forbes Australia reported the raise as Square Peg’s tenth investment in the company.
A valuation that nearly doubled in a year
The Series H caps a rapid re-rating. Forbes Australia charted the climb from a US$6.2 billion valuation at its Series F in May 2025, to US$8 billion at the Series G last December, to US$11 billion now, roughly a 77 per cent lift in about a year.
The SmartCompany tally that first flagged the deal noted the Series G raised $498 million and valued the company at $12 billion in local-dollar terms, underlining how quickly the price has moved.
The financials behind the number are substantial. Airwallex reported US$1.3 billion in annualised revenue as of March 2026, up about 74 per cent year on year, and annualised transaction volume of roughly US$287 billion, more than 120 per cent higher. The company says more than 90 per cent of revenue now comes from customers using more than one of its products.
Betting the next chapter on agentic finance
The capital is tied to a strategic pivot. Alongside the raise, Airwallex announced two products aimed at what it calls autonomous finance and agentic commerce, the idea that AI agents will increasingly move money, reconcile accounts and transact on a business’s behalf.
Co-founder and chief executive Jack Zhang framed the raise as fuel for that shift, telling Startup Daily the capital lets the company move faster into “autonomous finance, agentic commerce, and the infrastructure to power both”.
Zhang went further with Forbes Australia, arguing the groundwork was laid long ago. “We didn’t know it at the time, but the foundation we spent ten years building turns out to be precisely the kind of infrastructure that the agentic economy needs,” he said.
Lead investor Lee Fixel of Addition offered the thesis in blunt terms, telling Startup Daily that as AI reshapes the field, “the winners will be the companies building on top of real financial infrastructure, not around it”. It is a wager that owning the payment rails, licences and ledgers matters more than the model on top.
The regulator in the room
The upbeat funding news sits against a harder backdrop at home. On 22 January 2026, AUSTRAC ordered an external auditor to review whether the Airwallex Designated Business Group is meeting its anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-financing obligations, with the auditor to report within 180 days and the company to foot the bill.
As ACS Information Age reported, AUSTRAC suspects breaches of several sections of the AML/CTF Act and flagged that Airwallex’s transaction monitoring was not adequately calibrated for the full range of risks it faces as a global money-transfer platform.
AUSTRAC chief executive Brendan Thomas described the business as a platform “that facilitates the transfer of funds to multiple jurisdictions”, per Information Age, which reported concerns the service could be exploited by money mules. The regulator’s action has, by several accounts, pushed back Zhang’s long-signalled plan for a 2026 public listing.
Why it matters for Australia
Airwallex is one of the clearest test cases for the country’s ambition to grow globally significant technology companies rather than watch them list offshore or be acquired.
The company was born in Melbourne, still counts three of the nation’s marquee venture funds among its backers, and its returns flow partly back into the local capital pool that funds the next cohort of founders. Zhang’s stake alone was valued by Forbes Australia at about US$1.3 billion.
Yet the head office now sits in Singapore and San Francisco, a reminder of how easily scale-ups drift from the jurisdiction that seeded them. The AUSTRAC audit is the counterweight: a signal that regulators expect fast-growing payments firms to build compliance and financial-crime controls at the same pace as revenue, not after an IPO prospectus is drafted.
For the broader sector, the raise is also a jobs-and-skills story. Demand for engineers, compliance specialists and product staff who understand both AI systems and regulated financial infrastructure is precisely where Australia says it wants to compete, and a home-grown company at this scale is a training ground for exactly those skills.
What to watch next
Three threads will define the next 12 months. First, whether the agentic-finance products convert into revenue, or remain a pitch, as rivals such as Stripe chase the same AI-driven payments opportunity.
Second, the auditor’s findings and how AUSTRAC responds, which will shape both the company’s compliance costs and the timing of any float. Third, the listing question itself: at $16 billion, an eventual IPO would be one of the larger Australian-linked tech debuts, and where it lists will say a great deal about whether the country can hold onto the companies it builds.
Sources: SmartCompany, Startup Daily, Forbes Australia, ACS Information Age, AUSTRAC.
