The article tells the story of Airwallex CEO Jack Zhang’s ten-year entrepreneurial journey, from immigrant work at the age of 16 to rejecting Stripe’s acquisition, and now building the company into a global payment network valued at $6.2 billion. The article reveals how he found a breakthrough in the triple challenge of technology, capital and globalization, and achieved an upgrade from payment tools to API-level platforms.
If you are interested in cross-border payments, financial technology, the rise path of engineer CEOs, and the game between founders and investors, today’s article will present you with a rare perspective: how a founder who really moved a lemon box at 40°C, bartend cocktails in a hotel, wrote code, and survived desperately broke through the triple ceiling of technology, capital and globalization in ten years.
At the age of 16, Jack Zhang made a living by working alone in a foreign country – lemon factory, dishwashing room, night shift at a petrol station – working more than 16 hours a day just to pay $24,000 in international student tuition fees. Ten years later, he turned down Stripe’s acquisition and built a global payments network on his own with a valuation of more than $6.2 billion. It is expected that Airwallex will achieve annualized revenue of $1 billion in 2025, maintaining a growth rate of 90%.
This journey from a teenage immigrant to the founder of a fintech unicorn is not a template for a Silicon Valley story, but a business practice that Jack Zhang has grown in the midst of a crisis by integrating engineering background, industrial experience, and international perspectives. There are less empty words of “passion entrepreneurship”, and more real moments of typing code late at night and getting a turnaround in the face of financing rejection.
Recently, Jack Zhang reviewed those darkest moments in a conversation with 20VC Harry Stebbings, as well as the strategic inflection point that really allowed Airwallex to survive the cold winter and move towards scale: using payment as an incision, reconstructing the global clearing and settlement infrastructure, and upgrading from a “small and medium-sized enterprise collection tool” to an API-level platform to serve large customers such as Shein and TikTok. From I/O to iO, Jony Ive will drive a new design movement – AI is rewriting computing paradigms and hardware definitions, and it is also a new battlefield after large models
The battle for survival of a 16-year-old immigrant teenager
Jack Zhang was born in 1985 in a small coastal town in Shandong to middle-class parents who were bank clerks. His blunt nature was at odds with the school’s expectations of conformity, and he was sent to Australia at the age of 16. “When I first arrived in Melbourne, I was surrounded by sheep and horses, and it felt like the countryside.” He smiled and said that he often got lost because of the language barrier, and he couldn’t even understand the bus stop signs. To make matters worse, family financial support is disrupted. At the age of 17, he had to pay $24,000 in tuition fees at the University of Melbourne and make ends meet.
“At that time, I had no choice, so I had to bite the bullet.” Jack Zhang said. He worked 100 hours a week, taking the train and bus at 5 a.m., traveling two hours to the lemon factory, and carrying thousands of boxes of lemons in 40-degree heat, earning $14 an hour.
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During college, Jack Zhang’s schedule was filled with part-time jobs: bartending at the hotel from 4 pm to 11 pm, and working the night shift at a gas station from midnight to 8 am. “When you go to the gas station, you’ll hear, ‘Do you want five dollars for three chocolates?’ I am that person. He recalled, his tone a little self-deprecating. When I was busiest, I worked 4~5 days a week, 16 hours a day, and I had to read, so tired that I could fall asleep while standing. ”
On Christmas Eve, the train was canceled and he walked 30 kilometers home outside Melbourne. In loneliness and exhaustion, he had only one thought: “I don’t want to do this anymore, I want to find a real job.” This experience shaped his resilience: “A lot of people feel like 60 hours a week is going to collapse because they don’t know what a real hard day is. He believes that survival pressure is the best driving force.
The first taste of entrepreneurial success
An experience in middle school ignited his entrepreneurial fire. The student magazine “Urban Exploration” edited by him has transformed from an unpopular flyer service to a campus hit, attracting student readers by writing campus love stories and game strategies, attracting rush purchases. For a year and a half, the magazine advertised for thousands of merchants and earned considerable income. “That was the first time I tasted success.” Jack Zhang said this convinced him that value can be created as long as pain points are found.
While majoring in computer science at the University of Melbourne, Jack Zhang’s life was filled with work and his studies took a back seat. “I was a top student in high school, and college was only ordinary because I didn’t have time to study.” He said frankly. In his freshman year, he met Airwallex’s future CTO Dai Xijing, who was “a year older than me and a hundred times smarter.” The two became acquainted because of their interest in technology and often discussed the idea of starting a business.
He believes that the difficulties and hardships of growing up can make people more resilient, “In college, I worked and studied 100 hours a week and endured huge psychological challenges, which made me more resilient.” After graduating from college, he worked as an engineer at the insurance company Aviva and developed derivatives trading algorithms as a side business, turning thousands of dollars into $500,000, but the financial crisis cleared him overnight.
Later, he worked as an engineer at the National Australia Bank, and his side job was export trade, selling Australian wine and olive oil to China, and then importing textiles from China; He is also involved in real estate, trading tens of millions of dollars in projects. By the age of 28, his net worth exceeded $10 million, and his annual income from his side hustle was $2 million – $5 million, far exceeding the annual salary of his main business of $200,000.
“The side hustle makes me feel safe, but not happy.” “I love writing code, which makes me happy and eager to make a bigger impact with technology. ”
From coffee shops to payment revolutions
In 2013, Jack Zhang and alumnus Max Li co-founded Tukk & Co. coffee shop in Melbourne with the intention of replicating the retail myth on Australia’s Fast 50 list, but unexpectedly kicked off the payment revolution.
Tukk & Co. relies on imported coffee beans and packaging, making cross-border payments cumbersome. Max’s account was often intercepted by Swift because it had the same name as a person on OFAC’s sanctions list, and it took two months for the money to be refunded to an unsuccessful bank in Brazil. “When Max’s remittances were frozen, I realized that this was not an isolated case, but a structural issue for the entire industry.” Jack Zhang said. He began to study Swift, a system from the 70s of the 20th century, which was only 140 words long and required multiple bank transfers, which was inefficient. “Internet information can be transmitted in real time, why can’t funds be used?” Jack Zhang decided to start a business to solve this pain point.
A coffee shop party in 2015 changed the fate of Jack Zhang, who met Lucy Liu, an alumnus who had just resigned from the investment bank. During the small talk, he shared his vision, and unexpectedly, the 25-year-old girl he met for the first time promised $2 million on the spot. The next day they met at the University of Melbourne Library to discuss the details in detail, and Lucy ended up buying a 20% stake for $1 million. “I was shocked to see $1 million arrived in the account the second week. We didn’t sign any documents! He laughed that this trust was almost crazy at the time. Now it seems like an investment with a 1000x return!
Torn Term sheet
In the early days of Airwallex’s business, it passed by death three times. Jack Zhang recalled three near-death experiences, each time pushing the company off a cliff and dying at the last minute.
After receiving $1 million in financing, Jack Zhang decisively quit his job as a foreign exchange engineer, and the team moved into a 10-square-meter office, typing codes for more than ten hours a day, and sleeping in a sleeping bag when he was sleepy.
$1 million burned quickly, but the road to financing was bumpy. The three Australian venture capitalists didn’t even want to meet and sent him by email. “Most people say I’m crazy and rebuild the cross-border settlement network? This is too arrogant. He smiled bitterly, but firmly believed that the direction was right.
Jack Zhang traveled to China to raise funds, and Jingwei was particularly interested in his idea, signing a letter of intent to invest, after which Jack Zhang terminated negotiations with other investors. But no one expected that Jingwei China would regret it on the grounds that “the algorithm lacks a moat”. “It was the first time I experienced the cruelty of the capital market, rejected all other institutions, but was suddenly pulled off the ladder.” He said.
This left Jack Zhang in a difficult position with limited chips. Is he going back to the rejected investor and telling them that the opportunity is open again? What signal does this send?
Fortunately, Jack Zhang did not formally end negotiations with Gobi Partners. The investor filled Jingwei’s vacancy by offering to lead a $2 million seed round with a post-investment valuation of $10 million. But there is one condition: sign an investment letter of intent and ask to see the product’s MVP (Minimum Viable Product) before transferring money.
Airwallex was originally conceived as a peer-to-peer (P2P) payment solution that reduces costs by matching counterparties around banks. However, simulations show that P2P requires tens of billions of transaction volume, which startups cannot achieve. “We did the algorithm and threw it in the trash.” Jack Zhang said.
In other cases, other founders may close the company after the simulation fails and reject Gobi’s funds. But Jack Zhang was not willing to give up. Through cooperation with domestic payment companies, he and his team began to develop a cross-border payment product and quickly launched a prototype. Its products have potential, but they are only solutions. To become a truly big business, Airwallex needs to innovate on a deeper level.
To this end, Jack Zhang proposed an alternative. Abandoning the P2P model in an attempt to build on existing interbank systems. This is bolder than the original idea. One of the reasons he chose P2P is that no sane bank would work with a small company with zero forex trading volume.
In desperation, Jack Zhang decided to take a more direct approach. He made a cold call directly to Macquarie Bank, trying to persuade the other party to give Airwallex access to the interbank market. Jack Zhang is straightforward in his conversation, but his sales skills are surprisingly effective. “At 8 o’clock in the morning, a foreign exchange desk salesperson who was preparing to leave the night shift answered the phone. I presented our idea, and he was convinced! And persuaded the bank’s top management to help us access the interbank market. “An unexpected successful telesales that laid the foundation for the advice infrastructure.
The Series A product demonstration was collapsed
The second crisis occurred during the Series A fundraising. At that time, Jack Zhang aimed at a larger vision: to build a global payment infrastructure to support the needs of major customers such as WeChat Pay and Mastercard. He approached Sequoia China and Tencent for $13 million Series A funding.
However, Tencent’s internal approval was rejected by founder Ma Huateng, who felt that they could build their own company internally, so why should a small company of 10 people do better? Jack Zhang said. Sequoia was reluctant to invest alone, and the company was only two months away from bankruptcy.
“If anyone can convince Ma Huateng to approve the investment, it is only James Mitchell, chief strategy officer, or Martin Lau, president.” On January 5, 2017, he secured a meeting with James, “This is the most important meeting of my life.” “He stayed up late to debug the product, but during the final product demonstration, the 404 payment page was not displayed.” My face turned blue with fright. But James was still moved by the vision, which led to Tencent’s investment, and then Sequoia and Mastercard followed suit, and Airwallex came back to life. Sequoia USA’s Roelof Botha on the VC Observation Model in the AI Era – AI doesn’t weaken centralization like the Internet, but there are still structural opportunities
Reject Stripe acquisitions
In 2018, Airwallex exploded. When SMB customer growth was hindered, Jack Zhang decisively turned to an enterprise-grade solution, capitalizing on the rigid need for an education payment platform and increasing transaction volume from $5 million to $30 billion in nine months, demonstrating an undisputed product-market fit. “We realize that big customers are the key to breaking the game.” In mid-2018, all investors saw the trend and took the initiative to approach Jack Zhang. Soon, Tencent and Sequoia led the $80 million Series B investment, valuing it at $450 million.
At the heart of this transformation is the “underlying infrastructure thinking”. Jack Zhang abandoned the initial peer-to-peer model and instead invested heavily in obtaining payment licenses in Australia, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, the United States, etc., and built a self-developed clearing network. “It’s slow, but when our competitors are still relying on third parties, we’ve opened up the world’s most complete compliance network,” he explained. ”
Investors are not alone in noting Airwallex’s success. In September 2018, Stripe CFO Will Gaybrick was introduced by Sequoia, and CEO Patrick Collison flew to Shanghai for dinner with Jack Zhang for a day of product and vision. The two parties drafted a 20-page partnership on Google Sheet and found that the vision was very aligned: to build the AWS of finance. “At that time, Stripe didn’t have our global clearing network, we didn’t have Stripe’s acquiring products,” says Jack Zhang, “We wanted to get into each other’s territory. If Stripe acquires us, they will accelerate for many years. “Stripe made a $1.2 billion takeover bid, making it a life-or-death decision for the third time.
It was dizzying and Jack Zhang was in conflict. “Stripe is the best fintech company in the world, think about it, at the end of 2017 I was still worried about whether the company would survive, and in 2018 it received a $1.2 billion takeover offer that seemed impossible to refuse”.
“We were very entangled at the time, and the founding team discussed, are we going to retire?” “But I’m 33 years old and my life is just starting. “The cost of living in Melbourne is low, and I am not short of money, “No matter how much money I have, I don’t know how to spend it, what I care about is happiness.” So the team voted, 90% against the sale, “They believed we could do bigger.” “Only one person in management supported the sale, and this person was later poached by Stripe.
Patrick’s decision to decline the acquisition was also influenced by Patrick: “He was going to spend his life building Stripe to increase the GDP of the Internet. Jack Zhang was deeply touched, “I have never heard a founder so determined to spend decades doing a business. This also motivates me to replace HSBC and Citigroup in the next decade or so to make Airwallex the world’s largest global banking and financial platform. ”
The pain of dilation
As a tech-based CEO, Jack Zhang admits that management is “the most painful lesson.” After rejecting Stripe’s acquisition, Jack Zhang took Airwallex global, launching products such as business cards, acquiring, and more. In 2019, he blindly ventured into the UK and Europe, hiring a sales team without a product PMF and getting costs out of control.
“I am good at products and technology, not at building commercial organizations.” Reflecting on the internationalization strategy in 2019, he said, “We recruited a lot of people in the UK and the United States, but we didn’t even understand the needs of local customers, and the cost soared to the point where the capital chain almost broke. ”
In the early days, he insisted on hiring the first 100 employees himself, but encountered a cultural conflict when introducing executives with a banking background: “They questioned our ‘barbaric growth'” In the end, all these executives left, and the company experienced many twists and turns.
At the end of 2019, the company ran out of funds again, and in early 2020, the new crown epidemic hit the company’s profits, which fell by more than 50% in a month, and existing investors DST and Tencent put together a convertible bond to get us through that most difficult period. It was then that Hedosophia led a $200 million Series D funding round that allowed the company to start expanding rapidly around the world again.
When it comes to financing, Jack Zhang has his own principles: “Resist the temptation of the highest valuation and choose investors who can bring resources.” “Sequoia’s endorsement helped Airwallex open up the U.S. market, and DST’s Yuri Milner supported the team during the acquisition turmoil, and these investors who he saw as more important assets than money.” When Michael Moritz of Sequoia persuaded me to sell, I knew he was talking about rational choices, but the founders had to be a little irrational in their persistence. ”
This experience made him understand that globalization is not geographical expansion, but the precipitation of localization capabilities. It was not until 2022 that Airwallex found its first 100 million yuan customer in the UK, completing the transformation from “paving the way” to “taking root”.
Become the AWS of finance
Today, Airwallex is no longer the “payment startup” it used to be. After achieving profitability in 2023, its business covers full-link services such as global collection, corporate cards, online and offline acquiring, fee control management, and embedded finance, with an annual growth rate of more than 100% for eight consecutive years, and revenue growth in the latest quarter of 2025 will still maintain 90% growth. Jack Zhang’s goal is clear: “To be the AWS of finance, enabling SMBs to access financial and payment services like water and electricity anywhere in the world.” ”
In May 2025, Airwallex completed its latest $300 million financing, valued at $6.2 billion, equivalent to 13 times gross profit, similar to the valuation multiple of Stripe and Revolut. ”
Speaking about competition, he mentioned Stripe and Revolut: “We build a global financial infrastructure and build software and AI automation agents on top of it to help businesses expand better globally. There will be greater advantages in the cost and efficiency of cross-border payments. ”
Looking ahead, Jack hopes that Airwallex in 2035 will become one of the world’s largest “payment + banking” platforms, providing a stable and efficient financial infrastructure for millions of businesses worldwide. He emphasized: “Whether to go public or not is not the focus, whether we can truly empower global enterprises is our ultimate goal.” “a16z platform strategy past and present: from VC “reluctant to wipe ass” to “full-stack service”
