Airwallex president Lucy Liu invokes a car metaphor to describe one of her company’s newest products. “It’s like assisted driving, like you have in a Tesla,” she says to describe T:0, an automated bookkeeping system that can run a company’s entire financial department on its own. “You still have someone in the driver’s seat, but the car really drives itself.”

T:0 is part of a broader pivot for Airwallex, which got its start in Australia, and has emerged as a major global player in fintech and payments. Like platforms like Wise and Revolut, its business first grew alongside traditional industries that rely on cross-border payments, such as e-commerce, gaming, and online travel. But as AI changes how companies approach aspects of their business, including subscriptions and payment models, fintech firms like Airwallex are changing too.

In late June, Airwallex raised $320 million in a Series H funding round led by Addition, a returning investor, alongside Baillie Gifford, T. Rowe Price, Amex Ventures, and Washington University in St. Louis. The round valued Airwallex at $11 billion, up from the $8 billion valuation the startup got in December, when it raised $330 million in another Addition-led funding round.

CEO Jack Zhang, in a statement at the time, said the money would help the company “move faster into Airwallex’s next chapter: autonomous finance, agentic commerce, and the infrastructure to power both.”

“Our fundraising has been quite rapid over the past two years,” Liu tells Fortune, adding that this most recent round came as a result of “ongoing conversations” with existing investors like Addition.  “We have a lot ahead of us, and we just want to be able to have enough capital to fast-charge our plans.”

Chasing customers across borders

Airwallex was founded in Melbourne, Australia over a decade ago to help businesses move money across borders. Founders Jack Zhang and Max Li have credited the difficulties in running a coffee shop that imported goods from overseas as the inspiration for the business.

The platform now serves over 675,000 businesses, with over $1 billion in annualized run rate revenue. Liu declined to give specific numbers about profitability, yet noted that the company was “EBITDA positive” and had a “healthy gross margin.”

Now, as Airwallex leans into AI, it is touting two new features: the automated bookkeeping system T:0, and Ari, an agentic consumer wallet designed for one-click checkout.

Airwallex is also expanding aggressively into new markets, including the U.S., South Korea, Mexico and Brazil. (Liu concedes it looks like the company is “expanding everywhere.”) In some locations, Airwallex expanded through acquisitions, like how it acquired a Mexican payments license through its purchase of MexPago. In other markets, Airwallex has been drawn in by its clients: Expanding into Brazil on behalf of one client tends to surface customers who want to go in the other direction, toward Asia.

“Local businesses are all looking away to expand globally, and easier ways to operate globally,” she says.

It’s also making a push into the U.S. “If you’re a U.S. company that wants to sell in Australia, wants to sell in Singapore, wants to sell in the U.K., wants to sell in Canada, wants to do that efficiently, and wants to have banking, payments, spend, and treasury management all in a single platform, that’s where Airwallex comes in,” CEO Jack Zhang told Fortune in November.

A rebound?

Airwallex’s rapid-fire fundraises are part of a broader recovery in Asian venture funding after a sluggish few years. According to KPMG, VC-backed companies across Asia raised $50.8 billion in the second quarter of the year, the strongest performance since the fourth quarter of 2021.

Still, China alone accounted for $35.1 billion of that total, and much of the attention is being paid to AI and hardware. The four largest deals in Asia all went to Chinese AI developers: DeepSeek, ByteDance, StepFun and Moonshot AI.

The recent venture spree in Asia is notable, but VC funding in the region is barely a third of that in the U.S., where the country’s startups pulled in $145 billion in the same quarter.

More and more companies are raising money in late-stage investments such as Airwallex’s most recent funding round, a once-rare Series H. Others are staying private for even longer. Data processing startup Databricks, for example, is pulling together investors for an unprecedented Series M funding round that values the firm at $188 billion.

“Investors are going more towards later stage investments,” Liu says. “It’s not that they don’t have capital. They just want to see success, right? They want to see a track record before they deploy capital into that particular company.”

Companies are also wary of going public so soon. That includes the behemoth of the payments industry, Dublin-based Stripe, which was founded in 2010 and is still holding off on an IPO despite a reported $6.8 billion in revenue.

“Larger companies are still able to raise money without going public,” Liu noted. “Most people are still a little bit on the fence about going public.”

In the wake of some mega-U.S. IPOs—namely, SpaceX’s $85.7 billion debut and SK Hynix’s $26.5 billion ADR sale—as well as likely offerings from both OpenAI and Anthropic, debuts from other companies might not get the attention of institutional investors.

Liu confirms that Airwallex is still planning to be “IPO-ready” by the end of this year, but that a firm date will depend on market conditions. “It’s just not the best time, given how complicated things are,” she says. “I’m sure all the pre-approval companies will tell you this.”

Geopolitics and regulatory scrutiny

In June, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a prominent China hawk, sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent alleging deep ties between Airwallex and Beijing. “While Airwallex markets itself as an Australian company, its ties to Communist China run deep,” he wrote, pointing to a reported 20% stake held by Tencent and HongShan (formerly Sequoia China) and citing China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, which compels companies to assist Chinese intelligence services.

In his letter, Cotton called for an investigation of Airwallex by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, and potentially a divestment by Airwallex’s Chinese investors.

Cotton’s letter came after venture capitalist Keith Rabois, managing director of Khosla Ventures and a board director of competing fintech platform Ramp, called Airwallex a “Chinese backdoor into sensitive American data.”

Liu declined to address the letter directly, deferring to a prior company statement, though she framed the broader regulatory landscape as an opportunity rather than a threat. “There’s a new category being created for global businesses like ours, which is good, because you can imagine trying to fit us into a box where we don’t really belong,” she says.

Zhang has called the allegations “false” and, among other things, asserted that U.S. customer data was stored domestically and could not be accessed by staff based in China. His statement also clarified that Tencent holds a passive stake of less than 10%, and does not have a board seat. Airwallex has also invited third-party firms to audit its privacy and data controls.

The Financial Times reported in May that Airwallex also started moving some China-based staff that did not engage with Chinese customers out of the country, with a spokesperson telling the publication the shifts were due to data security.

The U.S. isn’t the only government making noise about Airwallex. In January, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), Australia’s leading financial watchdog, ordered Airwallex to bring on an external auditor to ensure the company was meeting anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism obligations. The watchdog said these actions were taken when it suspected “serious noncompliance.”

Liu says Airwallex is “cooperating fully,” and stresses the probe is industry-wide rather than company-specific: “I think we’re just a little bit more noticeable because of our growth,” she says.

Overconfidence

Liu, 35, was born in northern China, before eventually relocating to Auckland, New Zealand. After attending college in Melbourne, Australia, she then moved to the international financial center of Hong Kong, working for Barclays and then the China International Capital Corporation, a state-owned investment bank.

Her involvement in Airwallex began when Max Li—a friend from college—invited her to meet Zhang in Melbourne in 2015. Zhang needed $500,000 to fund his new startup; Liu, on a “career break” from finance, offered $1 million in seed capital.

“I was 25, and I had a bit of an overconfidence situation,” Liu says, laughing. “I remember traveling so much in 2017 and 2018. I would be on a plane almost every other day.”

Liu is one of the executives on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Asia ranking, which recognizes powerful female executives based in Asia-Pacific. Still, Liu admits she’s a little uncomfortable with highlighting her gender. “I actually have very strong feelings about being labeled,” she says. “People can often say: ‘It’s very hard for women to raise money–except for you.’ I don’t want people to feel like they’re exceptions.”

**Australia’s small pond **

Australia has become a surprising source of new tech companies in recent years. Airwallex is joined by Canva, the design platform currently valued at $42 billion, and Atlassian, the developer behind Jira, Confluence and Trello.

That’s a shift from a decade ago, when Australian founders focused on solving domestic problems. Liu remembers that Airwallex couldn’t even raise money in Australia when it was looking for seed money, due to the country’s small angel investor base. Now, Australian VC funds are much larger, approaching the size of U.S. or Asian funds.

Australia’s high levels of human capital, relatively more abundant access to natural resources, and friendly relations with Washington are also drawing more U.S. tech companies to the country.

Still, the country’s remoteness and relatively smaller market can make it a tricky place to launch a global business. Airwallex last year designated Singapore and San Francisco as its global co-headquarters, shifting away from its former home of Australia.

Liu says the headquarters move matters less for a global company that bases both talent and leadership across the world. Still, “Australia is quite small,” she admits. “If you’re really trying to grow a team, then the pipeline of talent and the market itself will restrict you a little bit. Businesses have to think outside of Australia to expand, grow and scale.”

“AI and tech companies are possible in Australia,” she concludes. “They just need a bit more help, funding, and mentorship to really be able to grow globally.”

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