Fintech Platform Airwallex Secures $100 Million in E2 Series Funding
Fintech platform Airwallex announced on October 11 that it has recently closed E2 Series funding, raising $100 million from existing investors Square Peg, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia Capital China, Lone Pine Capital, Hermitage Capital, 1835i Ventures and Tencent. Hostplus, an Australian industrial pension fund, as well as a leading North American pension fund also participated in this round.
Since its establishment in Melbourne, Australia in 2015, Airwallex has built a cross-border digital payments and finance infrastructure to help companies accept payments, move money globally and simplify their financial operations, all on a single platform. After the latest funding, Airwallex’s total funding amount increased to more than $900 million, with the same value of $5.5 billion.
Initially, Airwallex focused on providing cross-border payment solutions for high-growth start-ups and e-commerce platforms such as JD.com. Today, Airwallex’s business model is evolving into SaaS. Under this model, many business customers pay a fixed monthly fee to access platform services, rather than having to pay separate fees and deposits for each cross-border transaction.
The Melbourne-founded company accelerated its international expansion in 2021, expanding its reach across Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific, serving three of the largest domestic e-commerce markets in the world: China, the US and the UK. It plans to expand into the Middle East market and will soon enter South America as well.
Airwallex has continued to see its customer base more than double, with revenue increasing by 184% year-on-year. Its annual revenue is expected to triple to nearly $300 million by the end of 2022.
Airwallex announced in July the launch of its Airwallex Online Payments app on the Shopify e-commerce platform. This app is a payment gateway plugin that merchants can integrate with their online store to accept payments from global customers. This new app is offered through Airwallex’s payment acceptance solution that covers a wide range of payment methods, including Visa, MasterCard and UnionPay bank cards, and over 30 other local payment methods such as GrabPay in Southeast Asia, WeChat Pay in Asia-Pacific, and Bancontact and Immediately in Europe.
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Several new products and services are also planned for 2023, including improvements to the cost management platform and a credit solution, as the company continues to invest in product innovation in addition to market expansion and talent acquisition.
