Airwallex Hits $11 Billion Valuation on a New AI Finance Push

Airwallex closed a $320 million Series H on Thursday at an $11 billion valuation, a $3 billion jump in six months, and unveiled two AI-native products aimed at running finance for software agents that spend on behalf of businesses and consumers. The round was led by returning investor Addition, with capital from Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia, Haun Ventures, Washington University in St. Louis and Amex Ventures. Co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang framed the cash as fuel for a wager that finance will be run by agents rather than by humans clicking through dashboards.

The bet carries two unresolved counters: a December accusation from a rival board member that Airwallex is a “Chinese backdoor” into sensitive US data, and Zhang’s own statement to the Australian Financial Review that the new financing round means Airwallex can wait longer before going public. Both questions sat visibly in the round’s framing even as the company pushed forward with autonomous finance and agentic commerce as its stated next chapter.

The $11 Billion Round and What It Buys

Airwallex announced the Series H on Thursday from San Francisco, six months after its previous round closed at an $8 billion valuation in December 2025. The raise carried the company to $11 billion, a $3 billion increase over that prior mark, and put Airwallex alongside the new wave of AI-era fintechs raising at premium multiples. The proceeds, per Airwallex’s Series H funding announcement, will fund product development in autonomous finance and agentic commerce, expand the company’s infrastructure and regulatory footprint into new markets, and scale the teams building its next-generation AI-native financial software. Lee Fixel, founder of Addition, positioned the wager as an AI-era thesis compounding on real financial infrastructure.

The round was led by Addition, returning from the December raise, with new and existing capital from Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia, Haun Ventures, Washington University in St. Louis and Amex Ventures. His language puts the company’s regulated stack ahead of any software moat, with the agents added on top rather than built from scratch. The Series H thesis, in other words, is that the regulated stack plus AI agents compounds, with the AI part bolted onto an existing financial system.

What Airwallex has built is unusually hard to replicate. As AI transforms the competitive landscape, the winners will be the companies building on top of real financial infrastructure, not around it.

Fixel, founder of Addition and lead investor in both the December round and this one, said that in the Airwallex Series H announcement on Thursday. His phrasing is the spine of the Series H thesis, and it runs through both of the new products the company is launching alongside the round. Addition has now led two Airwallex rounds at rising valuations, the December raise at $8 billion and this Series H. The Series H closed into the same open question the December raise did: how to value AI agents on top of real financial infrastructure.

How T:0 and Airi Back the Wager

T:0 is the back-office bet. The platform is an AI-native financial platform designed to run the full finance function of a business end to end, automating bookkeeping, forecasting, taxes, compliance and reporting from day zero. The company says it is designed to give founders CFO-grade books with compliance built in and no migration required. T:0 is in private beta now and will be made more widely available in the coming weeks. The project sits under Lance Co Ting Keh, who joined Airwallex through the acquisition of OpenPay and has built applied AI systems at Google X, Cresta and Box.

Airi is the wallet bet. At launch this week, Airi ships as a one-click checkout product that Airwallex says delivered up to a 14% increase in successful checkout conversions for digital merchants in early testing. In the coming months, Airi is set to evolve into a regulated wallet infrastructure for agentic commerce, with delegated agent payments, spend limits, permission controls and multi-currency balances.

Pairing Airi with Airwallex’s existing Agentic Commerce Suite is meant to give merchants and consumers an end-to-end commerce flow on the company’s regulated rails. That’s the wedge the round is funding: AI shopping agents already execute purchases and move funds on behalf of businesses, and they need a regulated conduit for fiat or stablecoins that is global and licensed. Zhang framed Airwallex’s decade of regulatory and network work as the kind of infrastructure the agentic economy needs, even if the company didn’t know what that economy would look like at the time. The argument is that anyone could try to wrap AI around a fintech product, but only a few operators can hand an autonomous agent a real bank account with the licenses to back it up. According to the announcement, the Series H is meant to scale that combination.

A decade ago, we did not know exactly what the agentic economy would look like, but we built a foundation for it. The licenses, local network integrations, and settlement rails we spent ten years constructing are precisely the kind of infrastructure it needs.

Zhang said that in the company’s Series H announcement. His language positions Airwallex as a company that assembled the agentic economy’s infrastructure a decade before the agents showed up. In his essay on the AI era, the CEO also writes that the next generation of founders will not have to sequence their way into global markets, with AI agents making cross-border operations accessible from day zero.

Why the Regulated Stack Is the Wager

The regulated stack is the bet. AI shopping agents already execute purchases and move funds on behalf of businesses, and they need a regulated conduit for fiat or stablecoins that is global and licensed. Lee Fixel’s framing, that winners of the AI era will be companies building on top of real financial infrastructure, points at exactly this gap between AI agents and licensed banking rails. Airwallex’s pitch is that it has spent the last decade assembling that infrastructure and is one of the few global operators with the coverage already in place. The new capital is meant to deepen that coverage into new markets, the announcement said.

T:0 sits on top of the same licensed rails for finance ops; Airi sits on top of them for agent payments and wallets. The two products are designed to interoperate with Airwallex’s existing payment acceptance, billing, global accounts, corporate cards and spend management products, which the company bundles under one platform. T:0 is described in the announcement as a “standalone project” inside Airwallex, founded by Co Ting Keh and operating with the speed and intensity of an early-stage startup. The structure lets Airwallex push the agentic thesis forward without reorganising the parent platform around it.

The Core Business Behind the AI Push

Airwallex’s wager sits on top of an existing business that is still growing fast. The announcement shows annualized revenue and annualized transaction volume both jumped sharply year-over-year through March 2026. The majority of revenue now comes from customers using more than one Airwallex product, a metric the company points to as evidence that customers are deepening into the platform rather than churning out.

The company is profitable and has been since 2023, Zhang told the Australian Financial Review. Airwallex is co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with a workforce and office footprint that touches every region where the company holds a license. That base is what T:0 and Airi are being sold into, and what the new capital is meant to expand. The AFR also reported that Zhang said the new financing round means Airwallex can wait longer before going public, even as criticism in the United States has continued that the company is too close to Chinese authorities and is an untrustworthy holder of critical data.

Addition has now led two Airwallex rounds at rising valuations, the December raise and this Series H. The raise extends the runway for AI investment without forcing a public-market conversation about margins that are being reset by AI spend. The Series H, the announcement said, is meant to fund product development, expand regulatory footprint into new markets, and scale the teams building the next-generation AI-native financial software. The capital is going into a stack that already moves money at a scale most AI-native startups do not have access to, which sets a high bar for what the new products have to do to move the needle. The Series H closed into two open questions at once: the unresolved China data-sovereignty allegation and the AI investment that is pushing the IPO out.

• 85+ regulatory licenses across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific
• 160 direct integrations into local payment networks
• 200+ countries with payout capabilities
• $1.3 billion in annualized revenue (March 2026, up 74% year-over-year)
• $287 billion in annualized transaction volume (March 2026, up more than 120% year-over-year)

The China Question That Won’t Go Away

On December 1, 2025, Keith Rabois, the managing director at Khosla Ventures and a board member of Airwallex competitor Ramp, posted a thread accusing Airwallex of being a “Chinese backdoor” into sensitive American data from AI labs and defense contractors. The post named Rippling, Bill.com, Zip, Brex and Navan as US Airwallex customers and asked whether they had been told their customers’ data was being “quietly” sent to China. The thread drew 11,81,168 views, 1,560 likes, 99 retweets and 72 replies.

A Forbes account of the allegations says Rabois cited three pressure points. Approximately 40% of Airwallex’s then-1,700 employees were based in mainland China and Hong Kong, including core engineering teams with access to production systems. Over 20% of the company is owned by Chinese entities, including Tencent and HongShan, the firm formerly known as Sequoia China. The Forbes account reports that Rabois cited the PRC National Intelligence Law and Hong Kong National Security Law as creating obligations to assist with intelligence requests while maintaining secrecy. Rabois alleged the platform processes payments for US companies across sectors including artificial intelligence, defense contracting and cryptocurrency, and he specifically named OpenAI, Anthropic, Coinbase, Databricks, Snowflake and Robinhood as companies whose data could be at risk through those customer relationships.

Zhang rejected the framing in a public statement, describing the allegations as “wild and totally unfounded conspiracy theories” and saying American customers’ data is stored in the U.S. and inaccessible to staff based in China or Hong Kong. The Forbes account reports that the post alleged Airwallex “routes global payments for US companies in critical sectors, without disclosing that you are under Chinese jurisdiction.” A 2024 Department of Justice rule classifies transfers of US financial data to China as a national security threat. No US regulatory finding has been made public.

The allegation sits unresolved in part because Rabois has skin in the outcome: he sits on the board of Airwallex competitor Ramp, a conflict of interest Zhang’s allies have flagged publicly. Airwallex has rejected the framing, and no US agency has acted on the allegations in the time since. The central public airing of the claim remains Rabois’s December 2025 thread on X.

Why an IPO Wait Now Looks Like an AI Trade-Off

Zhang told the Australian Financial Review that the new financing round means Airwallex can wait longer before going public, even as criticism in the United States has continued that the company is too close to Chinese authorities and is an untrustworthy holder of critical data. The Australian Financial Review also reported that Airwallex has been profitable since 2023, so the delay is not a profitability problem. The delay is an AI-investment problem, with the cost of building T:0 and Airi and scaling the teams behind them resetting the math on near-term margins. The Series H gives the company runway to keep building without first answering the public-market question.

For Addition, the math is now written into the cap table. The firm led Airwallex’s December round and this Series H, and Fixel’s commentary in the announcement describes the wager as the AI-era thesis compounding on real financial infrastructure. The investor list for this round spans Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia, Haun Ventures, Washington University in St. Louis and Amex Ventures, joining Addition’s repeat lead. According to the announcement, the Series H is meant to fund product development in autonomous finance and agentic commerce, expand the company’s infrastructure and regulatory footprint into new markets, and scale the teams building its next-generation AI-native financial software. Airwallex has T:0 in private beta and Airi launching this week, with the IPO delay now part of the math that priced the round.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much did Airwallex raise in its Series H?

Airwallex raised $320 million in a Series H funding round announced on June 25, 2026, at an $11 billion post-money valuation, up $3 billion from the $8 billion mark set six months earlier in December 2025.

What are T:0 and Airi?

T:0 is Airwallex’s new AI-native financial platform, in private beta now, designed to automate the full finance function of a business from bookkeeping to taxes and reporting from day zero. Airi is the company’s new agentic consumer wallet, launching this week as a one-click checkout product that delivered up to a 14% uplift in successful conversions in early merchant testing, expected to evolve into a regulated wallet infrastructure for agentic commerce with delegated agent payments, spend limits, permission controls and multi-currency balances.

What is agentic commerce?

Agentic commerce is the buying and moving of money by AI software agents on behalf of people or businesses, rather than by humans clicking through checkout. Airwallex’s pitch is that the shift needs a regulated wallet with bank-account access, multi-currency balances and permission controls built in, and that the company’s ten years of regulatory work put it in position to provide that infrastructure.

Who led Airwallex’s Series H and who else invested?

Addition led the round, returning from its December 2025 lead. Other participants included Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia, Haun Ventures, Washington University in St. Louis and Amex Ventures. Fixel, the firm’s founder, said in the announcement that “what Airwallex has built is unusually hard to replicate.”

What is the China data sovereignty allegation against Airwallex?

On December 1, 2025, Rabois, the Khosla Ventures managing director who also sits on the board of Airwallex competitor Ramp, posted a thread on X accusing Airwallex of being a “Chinese backdoor into sensitive American data.” He cited approximately 40% of Airwallex’s then-1,700 employees in mainland China and Hong Kong, over 20% Chinese ownership including Tencent and HongShan, and PRC and Hong Kong national security laws as creating obligations to hand over data. Zhang has rejected the allegations as “wild and totally unfounded conspiracy theories” and said US customer data is stored in the US and inaccessible to staff in China or Hong Kong. No US regulatory finding has been made public.