Stripe’s Attempt to Acquire Airwallex for $1.2 Billion

Table of Contents

• 1. Airwallex’s growth leads to acquisition rejection
• 2. The Acquisition Proposal
• 3. Jack Zhang’s Decision Against Selling Airwallex
• 4. Airwallex’s Growth Trajectory and Revenue Milestones
• 5. The Role of Co-Founders in Acquisition Discussions
• 5.1 Voting Dynamics Among Co-Founders
• 5.2 Impact of Co-Founders’ Opinions on Decision
• 6. Jack Zhang’s Journey: From Immigrant to CEO
• 7. Airwallex’s Current Market Position and Transaction Volume
• 8. The Competitive Landscape: Stripe vs. Airwallex
• 8.1 Understanding the Market Dynamics
• 8.2 Future Prospects for Both Companies

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Airwallex’s growth leads to acquisition rejection

• Stripe offered to acquire Airwallex in 2018, when Airwallex had about $2 million in annualized revenue.
• Jack Zhang briefly agreed, then reversed course after returning to Melbourne and revisiting Airwallex’s unfinished vision.
• Today Airwallex says it has more than $1.3 billion in annualized revenue, growing 85% year-over-year.
• The company is processing close to $300 billion in transaction volume as it collides more directly with Stripe.

Note on figures: Revenue, growth, transaction volume, licensing counts, and timelines below are presented as reported by Airwallex and/or attributed to Jack Zhang in the referenced coverage.

From Early Revenue to Scale
– 2018 (at time of offer): ~$2M annualized revenue; proposed price: $1.2B (implied ~600x revenue multiple).
– “Today” (as reported in the same coverage): >$1.3B annualized revenue; ~85% YoY growth; ~ $300B annualized transaction volume.
– Why this matters to the story: the same decision (turning down $1.2B) reads very differently once revenue and volume are at infrastructure scale rather than early-product scale.
– Freshness cue: these are point-in-time figures as stated in the referenced reporting and may move quickly in private-company updates.

The Acquisition Proposal

In 2018, Stripe made a $1.2 billion bid to buy Airwallex—an offer delivered in the kind of setting that signals seriousness in Silicon Valley. Jack Zhang, then 34 and only three and a half years into building the Melbourne-based fintech, found himself across from Sequoia’s Michael Moritz at Moritz’s home in San Francisco, making the case for a sale.

Stripe–Airwallex Deal Snapshot
Deal snapshot (as described in the coverage)
– Buyer: Stripe
– Target: Airwallex (Melbourne-based fintech)
– Proposed price: $1.2 billion
– Airwallex revenue at the time: ~ $2 million annualized
– Implied multiple: ~600x annualized revenue (back-of-the-envelope)
– Key people in the room: Jack Zhang (Airwallex CEO); Michael Moritz (Sequoia)
– Core pitch: join a “generational founder” (Patrick Collison) and let the outcome “compound”

Zhang didn’t immediately dismiss it. He spent two weeks walking around San Francisco, restless and unable to think straight, weighing what a sale would mean for a company still early in its build. At one point, he said yes.

Then he boarded a flight nearly 8,000 miles back to Melbourne—where the decision would change.

Jack Zhang’s Decision Against Selling Airwallex

Zhang’s reversal wasn’t presented as a sudden epiphany so much as a slow, uncomfortable reckoning with motivation and unfinished work. He has described going “deep” on what drove him to build Airwallex in the first place. At three and a half years in, he felt he had only just “tasted” entrepreneurship—the thing he’d been dreaming about—and he wasn’t ready to stop.

Context mattered. Zhang said the business was “growing 100 times in 2018,” a pace that can distort judgment in both directions: it can make a founder fear missing the exit, or it can make them believe the ceiling is far higher than any offer on the table. For Zhang, it pushed toward the latter.

Two of his three co-founders had voted against the deal, which he has acknowledged helped anchor the decision. But the clearest signal, he said, came back at the office: a whiteboard with the company’s vision still written out, still incomplete. Airwallex wasn’t just a payments product in his mind; it was meant to become financial infrastructure that lets any business operate anywhere “as if it were a local company.”

Reconsidering the Acquisition Decision
Decision timeline (as described)
1) San Francisco: acquisition discussions intensify; Zhang meets Michael Moritz at his home.
2) Two-week “walk and think” period: restless, weighing the offer’s pull vs. the company’s unfinished build.
3) Tentative decision: “At one point, he said yes.”
4) Return to Melbourne (~8,000 miles): momentum breaks; context returns.
5) Co-founder checkpoint: two of three co-founders vote against selling.
6) Vision checkpoint: the office whiteboard still shows an unfinished infrastructure vision.
7) Outcome: Zhang reverses course and rejects the acquisition.

That framing—mission over multiple—has become central to how Zhang explains the rejection. The hard parts, he argues, are the point: the work that takes years is what creates defensibility.

Airwallex’s Growth Trajectory and Revenue Milestones

The decision to stay independent looks different when viewed through Airwallex’s current scale. The company now claims more than $1.3 billion in annualized revenue and says it is growing at 85% year-over-year—numbers that, if sustained, quickly change the conversation from “good exit” to “category contender.”

Zhang has also offered a timeline that underscores how long the early grind lasted. It took Airwallex six and a half years to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue, he said. After that, it took just over three years to get to $1 billion. The inflection, in his telling, came after the company had already done the slow work of assembling licenses, bank integrations, and local payment rails—foundational pieces that don’t always show up in early revenue but can unlock faster scaling later.

Slow Build, Fast Scale Logic
How the “slow build → fast scale” logic works in this story
– Step 1 — Permission to operate (licenses): determines whether you can hold funds, issue accounts/cards, and offer local-like workflows.
– Step 2 — Connectivity (bank integrations + local rails): reduces reliance on correspondent banking and makes settlement/FX mechanics more controllable.
– Step 3 — Product surface area (accounts → payments → spend/treasury): once you can collect/hold/convert/pay, you can bundle more workflows.
– Step 4 — Compounding distribution: more workflows per customer can raise revenue per customer and retention, which accelerates ARR.
– What the milestones illustrate: ~6.5 years to $100M ARR suggests heavy upfront infrastructure work; ~3 years from $100M to $1B suggests the platform’s “rails” started compounding.

Airwallex’s longer-horizon targets are even more ambitious: Zhang has talked about aiming for a million customers by 2030 and $20 billion in annual revenue. He has also pointed to average revenue per customer today of roughly $12,000 to $13,000, with a goal of pushing that to around $20,000 over time.

An IPO is not imminent. Zhang has said it is at least three to five years away—suggesting the company is still optimizing for build-out and market capture rather than near-term liquidity.

The Role of Co-Founders in Acquisition Discussions

Airwallex’s near-sale is also a reminder that acquisition decisions in founder-led companies are rarely a single-person act, even when the CEO is the public face. Zhang has said that his co-founders voted against selling to Stripe, and that their stance mattered.

That detail is easy to gloss over, but it points to something structural: when a startup is still early, the founders often hold not just equity but the institutional memory of why the company exists. They also tend to have different risk tolerances. One founder may see an offer as validation and security; another may see it as premature surrender.

In Airwallex’s case, the co-founders’ opposition appears to have functioned as a counterweight to the gravitational pull of a massive multiple and the social pressure of elite investors advocating for a deal. It also likely gave Zhang room to reconsider without feeling he was acting alone or irrationally.

The episode illustrates a broader truth about fintech infrastructure companies: because the hardest work is often regulatory and operational, the founders closest to that work may be the least willing to hand it off before the vision is complete.

Aligning Founders for Acquisition
Co-founder alignment checklist for acquisition talks (especially in regulated fintech)
– Decision rights: Who can say yes/no (board vote, founder vote, CEO discretion), and what’s the tie-break?
– Incentives: How does the offer treat each founder (vesting acceleration, earn-outs, role expectations)?
– Risk tolerance: What’s the acceptable downside if you don’t sell (runway, regulatory timelines, execution risk)?
– Vision fit: Does the acquirer’s roadmap preserve the “unfinished whiteboard,” or rewrite it?
– Operating reality: Who will own licenses, compliance obligations, and bank/rail relationships post-deal?
– Customer impact: What changes for customers (pricing, FX, settlement, product bundling) in the first 6–12 months?
– Communication plan: How will you keep the team aligned while talks are confidential and emotionally charged?

Voting Dynamics Among Co-Founders

That implies a four-founder team where Zhang, at least temporarily, leaned toward accepting—before ultimately aligning with the majority view.

While the internal mechanics aren’t fully public, the outcome suggests the co-founders’ votes were not symbolic. In many startups, formal control can vary by cap table and board structure, but founder consensus still carries practical weight—especially when the company is young and the founders are the ones expected to keep building after any decision.

The vote also highlights how acquisition talks can create asymmetry inside a team. The CEO is often the one in the room with investors and potential acquirers, absorbing persuasive narratives about “compounding” and generational outcomes. Co-founders, closer to day-to-day execution, may evaluate the same offer through a different lens: what’s left to build, what’s finally working, and what would be lost if the company is absorbed.

In this case, the “no” votes appear to have provided Zhang with a stabilizing reference point—permission, in effect, to step back from a momentary “yes” and revisit the decision with less momentum and more clarity.

Impact of Co-Founders’ Opinions on Decision

Zhang has been direct that the co-founders’ opposition “helped.” The significance is not just that they disagreed, but that their disagreement arrived at a moment when Zhang was visibly unsettled—two weeks of restlessness in San Francisco, followed by a provisional acceptance.

Co-founders can influence decisions in at least two ways: by changing the outcome through governance, and by changing the psychology of the decision-maker. Here, Zhang’s later explanation suggests the second effect may have been as important as the first. Knowing that most of the founding team did not want to sell likely reduced the fear of being the lone holdout against powerful voices.

Their stance also reinforced the idea that Airwallex’s value wasn’t captured by a revenue multiple. If the company’s core advantage would come from infrastructure—licenses, local rails, direct integrations—then selling early could mean transferring the payoff of years of difficult work to an acquirer just as the compounding was about to begin.

Ultimately, Zhang points to the whiteboard vision as the “clearest signal,” but the co-founders’ votes appear to have kept that vision politically viable inside the company at the exact moment it could have been traded away.

Jack Zhang’s Journey: From Immigrant to CEO

Zhang’s resistance to selling is hard to separate from the biography he often returns to—one defined by early independence and sustained hardship. He grew up in Qingdao, a port city in northeastern China, and moved to Melbourne at 15 without his parents. He barely spoke English and lived with a host family.

When his family’s finances collapsed, he took on four jobs to get through a computer science degree at the University of Melbourne, according to the Australian Financial Review. Those jobs included bartending, washing dishes, working graveyard shifts at a petrol station, and picking lemons on a farm during school holidays—work he has called the hardest job he ever had.

After university, he spent years writing trading code in the front office of an Australian investment bank. It paid well, but he has said it never felt “deeply fulfilling,” a telling phrase for someone who later chose the long route in a heavily regulated industry.

Before Airwallex, Zhang started roughly 10 businesses: a magazine at 14, a real estate development company, import-export operations moving wine and olive oil from Australia to Asia and textiles in the other direction, and even a burger chain. He was running a Melbourne coffee shop when the idea for Airwallex took shape—an origin story rooted not in abstract fintech theory, but in the friction of paying suppliers across borders.

Airwallex’s Current Market Position and Transaction Volume

Airwallex today presents itself as a scaled infrastructure player rather than a niche cross-border tool. The company says it is processing close to $300 billion in annualized transaction volume—an operational metric that matters in payments because it signals both customer adoption and the breadth of money movement flowing through the platform.

Its regulatory footprint is a core part of its positioning. Airwallex holds close to 90 financial licenses across 50 markets, according to Zhang, who estimates Stripe has “roughly half that number at best.” Those licenses are not just badges; they determine what a platform can do with customer funds in each jurisdiction.

Japan is Zhang’s go-to example of how licensing changes product capability. He has said the licensing process there took seven years. In that market, Stripe and Square can process payments but are required to transfer funds immediately out to the merchant’s bank account. Airwallex, with a fund transfer operator license, can hold funds inside its ecosystem—enabling customers to issue bank accounts, issue cards, and spend without the money leaving the platform.

In some emerging markets, Zhang says Airwallex acquired shell companies whose licenses were no longer being issued by central banks, then rebuilt the underlying technology entirely. The work is slow, but it creates a platform that can offer “local-like” operations across borders—collecting, holding, converting, and paying in ways that reduce reliance on correspondent banking and forced conversions.

The Competitive Landscape: Stripe vs. Airwallex

Stripe and Airwallex spent much of their histories operating in different lanes: Stripe as the developer-default payments layer for internet businesses, and Airwallex as a CFO- and treasury-oriented platform in Australia and Southeast Asia. That separation is eroding.

Stripe is pushing deeper into international markets, while Airwallex is making its first serious moves into the United States. As overlap grows, the competition becomes less about a single feature and more about whose infrastructure model wins: building end-to-end control versus building on top of existing rails.

Zhang’s critique of “riding someone else’s infrastructure” is blunt. If you don’t control the end-to-end workflow and something breaks, he argues, you can’t access the underlying data to explain it to customers, and you can’t extend new products cleanly on top. In his framing, “building on top of other infrastructure… is simply not scalable.”

Airwallex’s pitch to global businesses leans heavily on foreign exchange economics and local balances. Zhang has argued that a U.S. merchant settling in Australian dollars can avoid the 2% to 3% conversion fee that processors like Stripe typically charge to move money back into U.S. dollars—and can then use local balances to pay vendors, payroll, and marketing expenses at interbank rates.

Still, Zhang acknowledges a major disadvantage: brand. Stripe is Silicon Valley’s “golden child,” and its developer mindshare is a moat. Airwallex, he says, needs to embed itself in engineers’ thinking, not just finance teams’, so founders reach for it instinctively.

Understanding the Market Dynamics

The rivalry is also shaped by investors and valuation signals. Sequoia backed Airwallex early (through Sequoia Capital China, now Hongshan) and remains a major shareholder. Greenoaks Capital holds stakes in both companies, and Zhang has brushed off the idea that overlapping cap tables are awkward, noting investors are betting on a large market.

On valuation, the gap is wide. Stripe was valued at $159 billion in a February tender offer, up 74% from a year earlier, after processing $1.9 trillion in total payment volume in 2025. Airwallex was assigned an $8 billion valuation in December.

But Zhang argues the operating gap is narrower than the valuation gap implies. He has said Stripe’s payment volume is only about six times Airwallex’s, not 20 times. With Airwallex growing at 85% and projecting $2 billion in revenue within the next year, he suggests the revenue gap is closing faster than the market’s pricing would indicate—something an eventual IPO would force into the open.

Future Prospects for Both Companies

Near-term, the contest looks like a collision of go-to-market motions. Airwallex historically sold into the CFO’s office—finance directors and treasury teams—especially in Australia and Southeast Asia. Stripe’s growth engine has been developers in the U.S. choosing a default payments stack early.

Airwallex says more than 90% of its customers land first on a business account product, with payments and spend management following; over half use multiple products. That “account-first” wedge is different from Stripe’s “payments-first” wedge, and it shapes product sequencing and brand perception.

Airwallex is also betting that its data and product breadth can power automation. Zhang has described AI-powered “autonomous finance” products—agents that don’t just surface data but execute transactions—rolling out now. His thesis is that a decade of financial data across the corporate finance stack, from revenue collection to treasury management to vendor payments and expenses, creates a training set competitors can’t replicate overnight.

For now, the relationship between the two founders appears to have cooled with competition. Zhang and Collison were friendly during merger talks years ago, Zhang has said, but at Greenoaks Capital’s annual gathering last year, they didn’t speak. The market, however, is forcing the conversation they avoided: not whether Stripe should have bought Airwallex, but whether Airwallex can now take meaningful share from Stripe.

This analysis is written from a payments-operator perspective shaped by building and scaling payment-gateway and cross-border payment workflows in regulated environments across the U.S. and Latin America (Martin Weidemann, weidemann.tech).

This piece reflects publicly available information at the time of writing, summarizing a reported acquisition approach and competitive positioning described by company leadership. Private-company metrics such as revenue, growth, volume, and licenses may change over time and can be presented differently across sources. Any figures are intended as directional context for the narrative, not as audited financial statements.