How founder of Singapore-based Airwallex rejected Stripe buyout before building $997 million fortune

NEW YORK – Seven years ago, Airwallex co-founder Jack Zhang walked away from what looked like the deal of a lifetime. Stripe was offering to buy his company for US$1.2 billion and legendary Sequoia investor Michael Moritz was urging him to accept.

After weeks hashing out the details and sale price with Stripe’s billionaire co-founder Patrick Collison, Mr Zhang was close to agreeing. Then doubts crept in. He called a vote with his three co-founders and, over a WhatsApp call, they decided to turn the offer down.

Since then, the company they founded in Melbourne in 2015 has grown into a US$6.2 billion global banking and payments platform, now based in Singapore.

Mr Zhang holds a 12.5 per cent stake worth US$775 million (S$997 million), according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which is valuing the 40-year-old for the first time.

While Airwallex’s latest valuation is less than Stripe’s – most recently priced at US$91.5 billion – the two companies are increasingly overlapping as their product lines expand.

In 2024, Airwallex launched a new service helping US businesses accept payments online, bringing it into direct competition with Stripe.

A few months later, Stripe launched multi-currency accounts, something Airwallex has offered since 2018. 

“We’re going to compete a lot more in the next decade, and I’m excited about that,” Mr Zhang said in an interview with Bloomberg News. 

He said he plans to have Airwallex ready for an initial public offering (IPO) by the end of 2026.

That said, he is not in a rush to list, since he has ambitious growth plans and said he is sitting on more than US$600 million in financial firepower. Airwallex’s most recent fund-raising in late May added US$150 million in fresh equity financing from investors including Square Peg Capital, DST Global and Blackbird.

“We don’t have any concrete plans of going public immediately or in the next one or two years, but we will be IPO-ready by the end of next year,” Mr Zhang said. “We have plenty of opportunity to grow in more than 20 jurisdictions that we operate in, so we think staying private is a better approach for the time being.”

Side hustles 

Mr Zhang spent his early years in China’s Shandong province before he was sent to Melbourne to attend Westbourne Grammar School, where he lived with an Australian host family.

When he was 16, his father lost his job at a regional bank back home, leaving Mr Zhang to provide for himself.

He picked up a series of gigs – lugging lemon boxes at a factory, washing dishes at a local restaurant and working as a petrol-station cashier.

After finishing school, he enrolled in the University of Melbourne to study computer science.

The relentless work ethic and always-on mentality of his school years stuck with him.

“I always had a side hustle,” Mr Zhang said.

By the time he started Airwallex with his co-founders Lucy Liu, Dai Xijing and Max Li, he had already amassed a roughly US$10 million fortune working full-time in various engineering roles while also pursuing side ventures like the real estate development group he started, Hohen International.

While working as a solutions architect for the foreign exchange team at National Australia Bank, Mr Zhang started Tukk & Co, a coffee shop in Melbourne, with Mr Li, his college friend.

That eventually led them to found Airwallex.

A constant headache for the duo was that their payments to coffee bean vendors in Brazil and Indonesia were repeatedly blocked.

After some investigation, they concluded that another person with a similar name to Mr Li’s was on the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control’s blacklist, resulting in problems with cross-border payments that were being routed through the United States.

Mr Zhang concluded that the system of sending payments through a conga line of banks to reach the intended destination added unnecessary cost and over-complicated compliance.

“I’m a solutions architect,” Mr Zhang said of his thoughts at the time. “I can build a better system to essentially give retail customers the interbank rate, give them full transparency and make sure they don’t need to pay a whole bunch of spreads.”

No slowing down

In order to make that vision a reality, Airwallex holds licences around the world permitting it to open bank-like accounts in more than 70 countries and enables international transfers to 200-plus countries using local infrastructure in roughly 120 of those.

The company is Singapore-based, but with members of the executive team spread around the globe. Mr Zhang primarily splits his time between London and New York, while also trying to remain available for his global employee base.

The latter is becoming increasingly hard. The firm now has more than 1,800 employees in 26 offices around the world.

Local Australian media reported in 2024 that an intense workplace culture had led to high staff turnover. The same year, Mr Zhang shared in a blog post that the company had under-invested in the people and talent team, but had expanded those operations to support employees.

Mr Zhang himself does not show any signs of slowing down.

After the most recent fund-raising, his goal is to build Airwallex into a complete operating system for global businesses by increasing its investment in technologies like artificial intelligence.

While he has lofty ambitions, he faces steep competition from Stripe and other fintechs like Nium, another global cross-border payments firm that was valued at US$1.4 billion in 2024.

Mr Zhang said the demand for banking and payments platforms designed to accommodate international operations is on the rise.

“Tech-native businesses are more likely to be global from day one,” he said. “Any mum and dad selling on Amazon or Shopify is a global business.” BLOOMBERG