Airwallex Eyes ‘Borderless’ Banking as Valuation Hits $8 Billion

The new funding, announced Monday (Dec. 8), will help finance the company’s ongoing growth in the U.S. and fuel expanded artificial intelligence (AI) hiring and product development. Airwallex, based in Australia, says it has opened a second worldwide headquarters in San Francisco, and plans to spend more than $1 billion between 2026 and 2029 to expand its operations in the U.S.

“We believe the future of global banking will be borderless, real-time, and intelligent,” Jack Zhang, Airwallex’s co-founder and CEO, said in a news release.

“Legacy providers are fundamentally incompatible with how modern businesses operate, and our investors understand that we’re pulling ahead in the race to define this category. We’re building a modern alternative, a single platform that powers global banking, payments, billing, treasury, and spend on top of proprietary financial infrastructure.”

The release says Airwallex’s performance during 2025 helped drive strong interest among investors in the round. The company’s annualized revenue surpassed $1 billion in October, a 90% increase year over year. The same month saw Airwallex’s annualized transaction volume doubled year over year to more than $235 billion.

The new valuation marks a roughly 30% increase from the company’s last round of funding, a $300 million Series F announced in May.

And in September, Airwallex announced it was acquiring OpenPay to bring that company’s billing and analytics capabilities to the Airwallex financial platform and help it compete against players such as Stripe Billing and Recurly.

As part of the company’s new expansion efforts, Airwallex is developing a team of specialized AI agents to execute real financial workflows, creating the foundation for a “fully autonomous finance department,” the release added.

“These agents leverage contextual signals across payments, treasury, and spend activity to automate high-value, multi-step operations — from expense approvals and policy checks to end-to-end task orchestration,” the company said. “Hundreds of purpose-built agents will soon expand across the platform, enabling businesses to operate with greater speed, accuracy, and significantly less manual effort.”

This effort is happening at a time when, per research by PYMNTS Intelligence, businesses continue to adopt agentic AI, though not in a uniform manner.

As covered here in November, for companies that spent the last decade embedding automation into their systems, agentic AI represents the next logical step. But for businesses that have only moderate or minimal automation, it is a transition they don’t yet know how to achieve.

“Enterprises already comfortable with automation are speeding ahead, and over 90% of product leaders are leveraging outside vendors or consultants to help implement agentic AI rather than building in-house solutions,” the report added. “Still, others are holding back. Not because of lack of technology, but because of readiness, culture and risk tolerance.”