- Key insight: Global payments provider Airwallex raised $320 million in venture capital funding and instituted a new CFO.
- Supporting data: The company's valuation increased by 38% to $11 billion in six months.
- Forward look: Airwallex plans to use the funding for product development in autonomous finance and agentic commerce.
Airwallex has raised another $320 million in venture capital funding and announced the appointment of Pranav Sood as the company's chief financial officer.
The global payments company, which is a competitor to Stripe and Payoneer and based in San Francisco and Singapore, announced a Series H fundraise on Thursday that brings its valuation to $11 billion — a 38% increase from its $8 billion valuation in
Sood is returning to Airwallex from Bain Capital's growth equity fund, where he worked on scaling technology businesses across the U.K. and Europe. In his previous tenure, Sood led the initial build-out of Airwallex's EMEA operations.
"Bringing in a CFO out of a growth-equity fund who already knows the business from the inside is an IPO-readiness signal, not a routine hire," Ascento Capital Invest founder Ben Boissevain told American Banker. "You hire that profile when your next conversations are with public-market investors, not when you're still finding product-market fit."
Airwallex CEO Jack Zhang told the
Airwallex has raised $1.85 billion in total across 17 deals since 2016, according to data from PitchBook.
"The company's momentum is a powerful combination of both company growth and increasing AI sector valuations," Boissevain said. "A 38% step-up to $11 billion sounds frothy until you see that revenue grew 74% over the same window. This is fundamentals re-rating the company with the AI-infrastructure tailwind as an accelerant, not the cause."
Airwallex reported $1.3 billion in annualized revenue in March, up 74% year over year, and $287 billion in annualized transaction volume, up more than 120% year over year. Around 90% of Airwallex's revenue now comes from customers using more than one Airwallex product, according to the company.
"We believe this is the most consequential moment in the history of global finance, and we are building accordingly," Zhang said in a statement. "A decade ago, we did not know exactly what the agentic economy would look like but we built a foundation for it. The licenses, local network integrations, and settlement rails we spent ten years constructing are precisely the kind of infrastructure it needs."
Airwallex plans to use its new cash injection primarily for product development, according to a company statement. It will expand its infrastructure and regulatory footprint into new markets and expand the teams building AI-native financial software products, including product initiatives focused on autonomous finance and agentic commerce.
"Airwallex isn't raising to defend a payments business; it's raising to own the financial rails that AI agents will transact on," Boissevain said. "The licenses and settlement infrastructure they spent a decade building is exactly the moat that's hard to replicate."
The round was led by U.S. venture capital firm and returning investor Addition.
"What Airwallex has built is unusually hard to replicate," said Addition founder Lee Fixel. "As AI transforms the competitive landscape, the winners will be the companies building on top of real financial infrastructure, not around it. Airwallex has already shown it can translate that foundation into meaningful software capabilities at scale."
Airwallex holds 80 licenses and permits worldwide, including money transmitter licenses for 48 U.S. states. Airwallex also acquired the San Francisco-based billing fintech
