Airwallex and Stripe are now direct competitors

Years after rejecting a $1.2 billion acquisition offer from Stripe, Melbourne-founded Airwallex is scaling its own infrastructure to compete directly with the San Francisco-based payments giant. When Stripe made its offer, Airwallex had around $2 million in annualized revenue, representing a multiple somewhere near 600 times. After flying nearly 8,000 miles back home, instead of selling, co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang chose to build. Today, Airwallex has more than $1.3 billion in annualized revenue, is growing at 85% year-over-year, and processes nearly $300 billion in annualized transaction volume, according to Zhang.

The company’s strategy centers on what Zhang calls the path of max resistance—painstakingly building its own money movement network rather than relying on third-party intermediaries. The idea took shape when trying to pay coffee bean suppliers in Brazil, Indonesia, and Guatemala, where payments were frequently flagged by American intermediary banks enforcing rules from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC, a US Treasury agency) or delayed by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). Today, Airwallex holds close to 90 financial licenses across 50 markets, including Japan, Mexico, and the U.S. Securing these licenses is a slow process; in Japan, it took seven years. This infrastructure allows customers to bypass the 2% to 3% conversion fees typically charged by processors. It took six and a half years to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue, but just over three years to cross a billion. As Jack Zhang, CEO of Airwallex, noted, “Building on top of other infrastructure is simply not scalable.”

As Stripe expands into markets like Asia and Airwallex enters the U.S. market, the two companies are increasingly competing for the same customers. This has forced a direct comparison of their respective business models and valuations:

• Stripe: Valued at $159 billion in a February tender offer (a public solicitation to purchase shares)—up 74% from a year earlier—after processing $1.9 trillion in payment volume in 2025.
• Airwallex: Assigned an $8 billion valuation in December. The company has a target of $20 billion in annual revenue and one million customers by 2030, with average revenue per customer projected to grow from around $12,000 to $13,000 today to roughly $20,000.

While Stripe is well-established in Silicon Valley, Airwallex is leveraging its established presence in Southeast Asia and China to win over finance teams.

Why it matters

As Stripe expands into markets like Asia and Airwallex enters the U.S. market, the two companies are increasingly competing for the same customers, forcing a comparison of their respective infrastructure-heavy business models and valuations.