Airwallex, which was most recently valued at $5.5 billion and is backed by Tencent, has been tipped as one of many prominent fintech IPO candidates.
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Tencent-backed payments startup Airwallex hit an annual revenue run rate of $500 million and will look to get ready for an initial public offering by 2026, CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang told CNBC in an exclusive interview.
“I think the next big milestone is the $1 billion,” Zhang said, in response to a question on what’s next for the Singapore-based firm after crossing the $500 million ARR milestone last month. “Hopefully we can achieve that in 2026, or 2027. That is the goal.”
Run rate is a rough measure of how much revenue a company will make in a single year, based on monthly performance.
Zhang said that Airwallex has seen significant growth in its business in the last year, boosted by an expansion into developed markets such as the U.K., Europe, and North America.
In the Americas region, Airwallex grew its revenue by more than 300% year-over-year, according to figures shared with CNBC.
The U.K., Europe, and North America now account for more than 35% of Airwallex’s overall transaction volumes, Zhang said.
When asked by CNBC about how he feels about the prospect of an IPO for his business, Zhang said: “For us, it’s just about getting IPO-ready in the next two years so that we have the choice to go or not go.”
“In 2025, we will prepare everything, and we can decide what to do after 2026,” he added.
Airwallex crossed $100 billion in annual payment processing volumes this year, Zhang said, marking a 73% increase from last year. That came as the firm saw volumes growing across all its products, including payments, foreign exchange, payouts, and issuing.
“It took us nine years to cross the $100 billion mark,” Zhang said. “Hopefully it takes less than a year to get to $200 billion.”
Using ‘AI workers’ to cut costs
Airwallex is currently lossmaking, though the company achieved profitability on a monthly basis in December 2023 and January this year.
Zhang said Airwallex isn’t prioritizing making an annual net profit given its current pace of growth — but the firm has found ways to keep costs down.
Artificial intelligence, he said, is helping Airwallex make its employees more productive, while ultimately enabling the business to do more with less.
For example, he said that Airwallex is experimenting with 11x, a company that gives other businesses access to digital “AI workers,” to replace a significant portion of its sales development representatives (SDRs) — staff that focus on managing sales leads.
That pilot has only recently gone live, he said. But Zhang is so confident about the adoption of AI agents to take on the day-to-day work of SDRs, he thinks they could replace as much as 70% of those roles within its business with AI.
However, Zhang stressed that, while some roles will in effect be replaced with AI, most will be enhanced by the technology as Airwallex’s sales teams will be able to increase their productivity.
For example, one SDR could manage five virtual SDRs.
Airwallex, which was most recently valued at $5.5 billion and is backed by Tencent, has been tipped as one of many major fintech IPO candidates.
But Zhang said that the mood in the financial technology industry is still primarily sour, for the moment.
“Investor perception is still not great and is still conservative,” Zhang told CNBC. “That’s been going on for about three years. Nothing has really changed that much.”
However, he added: “Fintech is a very large market. You see big companies like Nubank, Revolut, Stripe, Adyen continuing to do really well.”
“Investors will still pick the right companies to invest. We just need to make sure that Airwallex is the number one in global payments in the financial space,” said Zhang.
