Hong Kong’s Airwallex raises $200m at $4b valuation
Hong Kong-based Airwallex has raised a $200 million Series E round led by Lone Pine Capital at a valuation of $4 billion. A $300 million Series D in March valued the company at $2.6 billion.
New investors include G Squared and Vetamer Capital Management. They were joined by existing backers 1835i Ventures, DST Global, Salesforce Ventures, and Sequoia Capital China. It brings total equity raised since the company’s inception in 2015 to $700 million.
It comes as Airwallex tracks 150% year-on-year revenue growth and a quadrupling of the client portfolio during the first half of 2021. The team has nearly doubled this year to 1,000 staff across 20 locations. At the time of the Series D, the company had 600 staff in 12 locations and was tracking 100% quarter-on-quarter growth.
Airwallex was set up by Jack Zhang, Max Li, Lucy Liu, and Xijing Dai, Chinese students who met each other in Australia. The idea was initially to solve pain points around cross-border money transfers they experienced as individuals. Gobi Partners, the company’s first institutional investor which achieved a 100x return on its exit earlier this year, advised a switch to a B2B model.
The company’s core service is now helping enterprise customers execute cross-border payments at scale by connecting with third-party websites and processing transactions using instant interbank exchanges. It has facilitated more than $20 billion in transactions to date.
The platform can process thousands of transactions per second and provide a cost-effective alternative to existing payment networks for businesses looking to automate and expand their international payment workflows. Clients include Tencent, JD.com, Ctrip, and MasterCard.
Recent growth milestones also include an expansion last month into the US, securing an e-wallet license in the Netherlands, and securing a money services license in Malaysia. Last month, the company’s founders also launched a VC fund under the name Capital 49 that will seek $200 million to build out an ecosystem of companies synergistic to Airwallex.
The fresh capital will be used to scale operations in North America, Europe, the Middle East, South America, and Southeast Asia. There are also plans to ramp up product development across the company’s five engineering hubs, build out the sales and commercial teams, and increase the breadth of digital offerings for small to medium-sized enterprises as well as large corporates.
“Airwallex has a clear competitive advantage in the digital payments market,” David Craver, a managing director at Lone Pine, said in a statement. “Its unique Asia-Pacific roots, coupled with its innovative infrastructure, products and services, speak volumes about the business’ global growth opportunities and its impressive expansion in the competitive payment providers space.”
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