Airwallex has spent a decade building the banking licenses and payment infrastructure that let businesses move money across borders. Now the company wants to use that same foundation for something newer: letting AI agents handle finance and shopping tasks on their own. Co-founded by Jack Zhang, Airwallex is betting that its years of regulatory groundwork will matter even more as this shift takes hold.
That shift is already visible across the payments industry. Major card networks are racing to build the systems needed for what's being called "agentic commerce," where an AI agent researches, picks, and pays for a product on a person's behalf instead of a human clicking "buy." Mastercard recently launched a system built for this kind of machine driven payment, describing a future where companies build services specifically for AI agents to use. Estimates vary, but one widely cited forecast projects that agentic commerce could account for $3 trillion to $5 trillion in global retail spending by 2030. Airwallex's new funding round lands right in the middle of that race.
Airwallex has raised $320 million in Series H funding. The deal lifts the company's valuation to $11 billion, up from $8 billion as of December 2025. Addition led the round as a returning investor. Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia, Haun Ventures, Washington University in St. Louis, and Amex Ventures also took part.
The payments industry is in the middle of a broad push toward automation, and this round shows how much money is chasing that trend. Banks and payment networks across the industry are building new tools so that AI agents can be trusted to make purchases and move money safely. In late January 2026, IBM reported that AI agents are already researching, negotiating, and completing purchases for consumers and businesses, often without a human involved at any point. That has pushed both established financial institutions and newer companies to build the licensing, compliance, and identity verification systems that agent led transactions require.
Addition, the round's lead investor, sees Airwallex's years of regulatory work as a real advantage now that the industry is heading in this direction.
"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. Airwallex has already shown it can translate that foundation into meaningful software capabilities at scale." — Lee Fixel, Founder and Managing Partner of Addition
Owning the licenses and banking rails that other companies build on top of, rather than depending on someone else's infrastructure, is becoming a bigger factor for investors sizing up fintech companies as agentic commerce takes shape.
Airwallex says the new money will go toward two new areas: autonomous finance and agentic commerce. The company also plans to expand its infrastructure and regulatory reach into new markets, and to keep growing the teams behind what it calls its next generation of AI native financial software.
Two new products sit at the center of that plan. The first, called T:0, is meant to run a company's entire finance department on its own, handling bookkeeping, forecasting, taxes, compliance, and reporting from the day a business signs up. It requires no migration from existing systems. T:0 is currently in private beta and is expected to open up more widely in the coming weeks. The second product, Airi, is a wallet built for agentic commerce. At launch, it will include Airwallex's existing one click checkout tool, which the company says has raised successful checkout completion by up to 14 percent for digital merchants in early testing. Over time, Airwallex plans to expand Airi so AI agents can make payments directly, within spending limits and permission controls set by the user.
Jack Zhang, the company's co-founder and CEO, described the investment as part of a long-term plan rather than a response to a short-term trend.
"We believe this is the most consequential moment in the history of global finance, and we are building accordingly. 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. This new capital lets us move faster into Airwallex's next chapter: autonomous finance, agentic commerce, and the infrastructure to power both." — Jack Zhang, Co-founder and CEO of Airwallex
Airwallex was founded in Melbourne in 2015. It describes itself today as an AI native financial operating system for modern businesses. In simpler terms, that means it helps companies manage money across different countries: holding multiple currencies, accepting payments, issuing corporate cards, and handling transfers, all from one platform. Without a service like this, a business operating in several countries would typically need separate banking relationships in each one.
According to the company, it now serves more than 676,000 businesses worldwide, either directly or through partners that build on top of its platform. Airwallex holds more than 85 licenses across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific. That licensing work underpins its core products, including payment acceptance, billing, global accounts, corporate cards, and spend management. The company is co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, with more than 2,300 employees across 27 offices.
Airwallex also shared some recent business numbers alongside the funding news. In March 2026, the company reported $1.3 billion in annualized revenue, a 74 percent increase from the year before. Annualized transaction volume reached $287 billion, up more than 120 percent year over year. More than 90 percent of Airwallex's revenue now comes from customers using more than one of its products, which the company points to as evidence that businesses are relying on it for a wider range of financial needs rather than just one service.
This round builds on a steady run of funding for Airwallex. The company was valued at $8 billion as recently as December 2025 before this latest raise pushed that number to $11 billion. Addition returned as lead investor after backing the company in earlier rounds. Joining the round were a mix of venture and growth investors, including Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia, and Haun Ventures, along with Washington University in St. Louis and Amex Ventures.
Firms like T. Rowe Price and Baillie Gifford typically invest in more mature companies. Their presence alongside venture firms such as QED Investors and Haun Ventures suggests a funding round meant to support both continued growth and a more established stage of the company's development.
