Square Peg invests in Australia's Airwallex

Airwallex will leverage Square Peg's knowledge of online marketplaces that process large volumes of low-value payments, according to an Australian Financial Review article linked to from the company's LinkedIn account.

Founded in 2015, Airwallex offers services that enable business customers to make and receive international payments at scale, while minimizing cost. It provides application programming interfaces (APIs) that can be plugged into third-party websites and process transactions using inter-bank exchanges.

The company, which employs 65 people in Melbourne, London, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzhen, is also the implementation partner for WeChat Pay in Australia.

WeChat owner Tencent Holdings is an investor in Airwallex, having participated in the $13 million Series A round in May alongside Mastercard and Sequoia Capital China. The company was previously the first Australian entrant in Mastercard's accelerator program and went on to receive a $3 million pre-Series A round from Gobi Partners in 2016.

Jack Zhang (pictured, center), co-founder and CEO of Airwallex, said the Square Peg investment would allow the company to focus on growth for longer before raising its Series B round.

Paul Bassat, co-founder of job listings site Seek, established Square Peg in 2012 with Barry Bott, previously an early-stage investor for a family office, and Tony Holt, formerly head of principal investments for Macquarie Capital Asia. The firm made investments outside of a formal fund structure prior to closing its debut vehicle at A$234 million ($180 million) in March.

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• Topics
• Australasia
• Technology
• Financials
• Early-stage
• Australia
• Square Peg Capital
• Financial Services