The $1.2 Billion Offer From Stripe

Jack Zhang, Airwallex.

Jack Zhang had just landed on the tarmac in Shanghai. He was here to meet Patrick Collison, the Irish co-founder and CEO of Stripe, the new giant in payments. A few weeks earlier, in September 2018, Jack had received a message from the Sequoia team — the investment fund is backing both companies. Stripe’s CFO, Will Gaybrick, wanted to discuss something important. They first spoke over the phone, and Will was clear about his intention: “We’re interested in acquiring Airwallex.” The offer on the table was $1.2 billion. It felt surreal to Jack. Airwallex had only been around for three years, had only started generating revenue a year ago, and already this kind of acquisition offer was coming through.

An introduction email was quickly sent between the two CEOs, and the conversation moved to WhatsApp, leading up to this first meeting in the Chinese megacity. It wouldn’t be the last. After that initial encounter, Jack, his co-founders, and Airwallex’s management team were invited to spend a week in San Francisco, home to Stripe’s headquarters. Jack and Patrick would also meet again in Singapore, just the two of them this time, and later in Melbourne.

A few weeks later, back in San Francisco, a formal offer was made. It was decision time. Jack hadn’t been sleeping for two weeks. Sequoia was in favor of the deal, but the founders couldn’t stop thinking about the potential of what they were building.

***

Nothing predestined Jack Zhang to become one of the world’s financial leaders. He grew up in Qingdao, China. A “small city,” as he says, with eight million people. His parents both worked in banking, weren’t home much, and Jack mostly lived with his grandparents. So he started to hate banking, this thing that kept him from spending time with his parents. And on top of that, what he really wanted was to work at Microsoft. He loved technique, was good at math and physics, and became one of the brightest students in the city.

But you know that comfort when everything’s going well, when you succeed, when you get good grades at school? And all the confidence that comes with it? Well, Jack lost all of that when, at 15, his parents sent him to study in Australia even though he barely spoke English. “I went from, academically, the top 100 in my school to some random student that didn’t speak English very well,” he remembers. Jack moved in with a host family. Adapting was hard. He discovered a new language, a new culture, a new city where he often got lost because he had no familiar landmarks. But he picked things up quickly, that part didn’t change, and he managed to get his diploma and was accepted into the University of Melbourne to study Computer Science.

When Jack came back to China to see his family, his dad’s driver usually picked him up at the airport. But this time, no one was there. When he got home, he found his father smoking a cigarette, something he had never done before. He quickly understood something was wrong.

His father had just lost his job and could no longer pay for Jack’s studies in Australia.

***

From a young age, Jack had a knack for business. And boldness, that much is clear. At 13, while still just a school kid, he launched a video game magazine called Urban Exploration. He didn’t see it as a business at all, more like a hobby, the kind you dive into with teenage carefree energy. Still, the magazine ended up generating $100,000 in profit which he eventually gave back to his school.

So when he found out he’d lost his parents’ financial support, Jack didn’t hesitate to roll up his sleeves. During school breaks, he’d wake up every morning at 5 a.m. to catch a train heading inland, where he worked countless hours in a lemon factory. He picked up more jobs, in a computer store, at a petrol station supermarket. He spent all his time working and barely saw his friends. At that moment, he had only one goal: to get out of the situation he was stuck in. One day, while bartending at the Westin, he saw a group of bankers in sharp suits attending a seminar. For the first time, he considered working in banking.

Degree in hand, Jack flew to Europe and landed in London. He had obtained a job as a Software Engineer at Aviva, where he stayed for two years before heading back to Melbourne, still in banking, this time working on cross-border payments. But as you’ve probably guessed by now, banking wasn’t exactly Jack’s thing. So he started launching a whole series of side businesses alongside his day job.

Brace yourself, the list is long.

His biggest side business was property development, launched with his friend Max Li, an architect. On top of that, Jack started a burger chain, a wine and olive oil trading company, and a café in Melbourne. What’s striking, listening to him, is how simple he makes it all sound, things that would scare most people. “Nothing is that hard,” he says, like the time he decided to demolish and rebuild his own house just to get a better grip on how the real estate game worked.

After a few years, he was generating millions in revenue. All while keeping his day job in banking. He worked 15 hours a day and quickly became known for his relentless work ethic.

Jack’s situation at that point would satisfy most of us. But not him. He wanted more. He wanted to build a billion-dollar company, and as you’ve seen, long hours weren’t going to stop him. As a young father, he wanted to make his daughter proud, to have a real impact on the world. It was through his café business, where he had to import coffee, that he realized how complex cross-border payments are for a business. With his background in banking, he decided to take on the problem.

For the first time, he stepped away from the day-to-day of all his other projects to focus on just one: Airwallex.

***

Jack launched Airwallex in 2015 with friends from university and his old job: Max Li, his partner in the real estate business and the coffee shop, Jacob Dai, and Ki-Lok Wong. A fifth person would soon join them.

The coffee shop Jack and Max had opened was just downstairs from the bank where Jack worked. One Friday afternoon, while Jack was having a coffee, Lucy Liu, a friend of Max’s visiting from China walked in. She had just left her job at an investment bank, and she and Jack started chatting. They hit it off, and all decided to go out for dinner that evening.

— So, what do you do? Lucy asked later that night.

— I work at a bank, Jack replied, but I’m about to quit and start a company to revolutionize how money moves globally.

Curious, Lucy asked him what the plan was.

— We’re going to Hong Kong to raise money from VCs.

— Oh… how much are you looking to raise?

— A million or two to start.

— What if I gave you two million for 40% of the company?

Jack was taken aback. Was she serious? It didn’t look like some joke thrown around between bites of dinner. Lucy, in her twenties, was completely serious, and they all agreed to meet the next morning at the University of Melbourne library to talk more. 8 a.m. sharp.

By 11 a.m. the next day, a deal was struck. Lucy would invest $1 million — despite her husband’s refusal, the money was originally meant for real estate — in exchange for 20% of the company. The company didn’t even exist yet. Jack hadn’t quit his job. But by 11 a.m. Monday morning, $1,000,000 had landed in Jack’s account.

Looks like it was time to build.

***

Airwallex’s first two products were total failures. There were many ways to approach the topic of cross-border payments, and they didn’t pick the right ones to start. The first idea was to do peer-to-peer, but the volume needed to make the model work was way too high. A quarter of the money they’d raised was already gone (alongside Lucy’s investment, Airwallex had raised another $2 million from Hong Kong VC Gobi Partners). The second idea was to build an invoicing solution to help Australian e-commerce sellers get paid from China. Another failure.

Cash was starting to get tight, product-market fit still wasn’t showing up, and the team needed to raise again.

In September 2016, Jack was introduced to Sequoia by his Hong Kong investor. Then to Tencent, through friends of friends. Airwallex hadn’t yet found the right product, but the vision, reinventing how money moves around the world, was appealing. After a few conversations, Sequoia agreed to invest alongside Tencent but under one condition: Tencent had to lead the round. That’s when things went south. Pony Ma, Tencent’s founder, pulled the plug at the very last stage of approval — it wasn’t the first time Jack had seen a deal fall through. A year earlier, Matrix had offered $2 million for 20% of the company, then cancelled the offer at the last minute. Again, everything collapsed. But Jack didn’t give up. For three months, he tried every possible path to land another meeting with Tencent and convince them his vision was right. His persistence paid off and Airwallex raised a $13 million Series A from Tencent, Sequoia, and Mastercard.

That was close. There were only six weeks of cash left and no plan B.

With this new investment, the team could start iterating on a third product. The company spent 2017 building an API-product that allows businesses to send and receive international payments with lower fees and faster settlement than traditional banks. This time, they got it right.

In 2018, payment volumes took off, thanks in large part to SHEIN, which was growing rapidly at the time and became a key revenue driver for the fintech. Airwallex went from processing $0 in January to over $1 billion by the end of the year.

That’s when Stripe came in with an acquisition offer. Airwallex’s presence in Asia-Pacific was highly attractive for the California-based company, as was its deep expertise in cross-border payments and that promising vision of Global Banking. $1.2 billion, while Airwallex was only generating $2 million in revenue… it looks like an offer you can’t refuse. But it was so early. The potential was enormous.

Jack and his co-founders ultimately rejected the offer.

***

Airwallex kept going. In 2019, the fintech brought in $10 million in revenue. In 2020, $20 million. But in 2021, COVID hit and Airwallex’s revenue dropped. Money wasn’t moving around the world the way it used to. But the team had been working on a new product for a while, and the timing couldn’t have been better to launch it.

Recognizing that businesses needed more than just FX payments, Airwallex introduced multi-currency business accounts. It worked. The next step was a natural one: expanding the business banking offering to include spend management and embedded finance.

Imagine a business that started using Airwallex to pay overseas suppliers with lower FX fees. As it grew, it opened a multi-currency account to collect payments from international customers. Then came Airwallex’s corporate cards to handle travel expenses. Later, the company integrated Airwallex’s APIs into its own platform to automate payouts to vendors in multiple countries. Today, that business runs on a full suite of banking services, all from a single provider.

In June 2025, Airwallex surpassed $800 million in annualized revenue, up 90% from the previous year, and exceeded $130 billion in annualized global payment volume. The company is now valued at $6.2 billion, after a $300 million Series F in May, bringing total funding to over $1.2 billion. Airwallex now serves more than 150,000 businesses globally, with a team of 1,800+ people across 25 offices worldwide, and will be IPO-ready by 2026.

Drop everything to build a billion-dollar business? Bet won.

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Credit to my main sources:

• HD in HD

• The Generalist

• Airwallex’s Team

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