Airwallex hits $11B valuation, bets on AI finance amid China scrutiny

Airwallex raised $320 million in a Series H funding round that values the global payments firm at $11 billion. The valuation is 38% higher than the $8 billion tag from a December round, also led by New York venture firm Addition. Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T. Rowe Price, Washington University in St. Louis and Amex Ventures joined the latest round.

The company said annualized revenue reached $1.3 billion in March, up 74% from a year earlier. Annualized transaction volume more than doubled. More than 90% of revenue came from customers using multiple Airwallex products, the company said.

Airwallex plans to use the capital to build two AI-native products. One, called T:0, automates corporate finance functions such as bookkeeping, tax and compliance. It is in private beta now and could become widely available soon. The other, Airi, is a consumer wallet designed for delegated agent payments, with spending limits and multi-currency balances. The company holds 85 licenses across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific – a regulatory footprint it says positions it for the "agentic economy."

Co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang said in a statement that the licenses, local network integrations and settlement rails built over a decade are exactly what an agent-driven system needs. In an interview with the Australian Financial Review, he added that AI development has made margins "too volatile to go public," implying the new capital could delay a listing.

The raise revives scrutiny over Airwallex's ties to China. In December, Silicon Valley investor Keith Rabois, a board member of rival Ramp, called Airwallex a "Chinese backdoor into sensitive American data." Zhang dismissed that as a "wild and totally unfounded conspiracy theory," noting that U.S. customer data is stored domestically and inaccessible to staff based in China or Hong Kong.

T. Rowe Price (TROW stock page, Alpha Score 77/100, Strong) appears as an investor in this round. Tencent (TCEHY stock page, Alpha Score 48/100, Mixed) and HongShan Capital, formerly Sequoia China, are earlier backers. Tencent's involvement keeps the China question alive even as Airwallex frames itself as a global firm headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore.

The $11 billion valuation implies roughly 8.5x the $1.3 billion revenue run rate. That premium will be tested by how quickly T:0 and Airi move from beta to paying customers, and by how regulators assess the company's data governance. Zhang said American customer data is stored in the U.S. and inaccessible to China-based employees. The company now has 85 licenses in key markets. The next concrete milestone is the T:0 beta schedule, which Airwallex said could expand in the coming weeks.