The Coffee Bean Fee That Built an 11 Billion Dollar Payments Fortune

Jack Zhang worked out the true cost of moving money across borders while running a coffee shop side business. Importing beans meant paying Western Union a 4.5 percent fee, so a 15,000 dollar order quietly cost him more than 500 dollars extra just to send the payment. That small, maddening leak became the seed of Airwallex, the cross border payments company he co founded in 2015 and which is now valued at 11 billion dollars. Zhang owns about 12 percent of it, a stake worth roughly 1.3 billion dollars, making the 41 year old one of fintech's newest billionaires.

The path there was anything but smooth. Zhang grew up in Shandong, China, and moved to Australia at 15, working his way through a computer science degree at the University of Melbourne with stints as a dishwasher, a gas station attendant, a bartender and a laborer at a lemon factory. He later wrote software for an insurance firm and traded foreign currencies as an algorithmic trader at National Australia Bank, a job that taught him exactly where the money sits in a currency transaction.

Ten startups before one worked

Airwallex was not an overnight idea. By his own account Zhang had launched close to ten startups before it, and the early versions of Airwallex itself stumbled twice. A first product that matched people wanting to swap currencies peer to peer never found enough volume to work. A second attempt, invoicing software for small businesses, collapsed under the cost of winning customers. The breakthrough came in 2018, when the company pivoted to serve large firms that needed to convert currencies and push out payments at scale. Transaction volume that year hit 1 billion dollars and produced about 2 million dollars in revenue, and one early client, the fast fashion retailer Shein, alone accounted for 1 billion dollars in flow.

That pivot also brought a moment Zhang chose to walk away from. In October 2018 Stripe offered to buy Airwallex for 1.2 billion dollars. He turned it down, betting the company was worth far more on its own.

A quarter trillion dollars in flow

The bet has paid off so far. By March 2026 Airwallex was moving more than 250 billion dollars a year for about 300,000 customers across 47 countries, and its revenue run rate had reached 1.3 billion dollars. The business is not yet profitable, but its growth has drawn a marquee list of backers. A 320 million dollar round in June 2026 set the 11 billion dollar valuation, led by Lee Fixel's Addition, with Baillie Gifford, QED, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia, Haun Ventures and Amex Ventures alongside. Earlier investors include Tencent and HongShan, the firm formerly known as Sequoia China. The very first check, a 1 million dollar seed, came from co founder Lucy Liu.

What customers buy is a bundle that increasingly looks like a bank for globally minded companies. Airwallex offers cross border payments, multicurrency accounts, corporate charge cards, bill payment, online payment processing, bookkeeping and expense management with a growing layer of artificial intelligence. Its clients read like a roster of the modern internet economy, including Canva, Deel, Brex and Afterpay. The money comes from foreign exchange fees, payment processing, card interchange, software subscriptions and the interest spread on balances it holds.

Owning the plumbing

The reason Airwallex can undercut the old wire transfer model is that it has spent years building its own rails. The company holds 89 payment and money movement licenses around the world and plugs directly into central bank and local clearing systems, which lets it sidestep the correspondent banking chain that runs over the Swift network and adds cost at every hop. That control is the quiet engine behind both its pricing and its margins.

Scale at this speed invites scrutiny. In January 2026 Australia's anti money laundering regulator announced an audit into suspected compliance failures, and the company commissioned a security assessment from the cybersecurity firm Coalfire. Zhang has also had to address questions about data and its China ties, stating that United States customer data is stored in the United States and that staff based in China and Hong Kong, present because those are important markets, cannot reach it.

The next front

Airwallex keeps widening its territory. It shifted its base from Melbourne to Hong Kong and then to Singapore in 2023, and by late 2025 had settled into dual headquarters split between San Francisco and Singapore. Its business now spreads across three regions, with about 61 percent of activity in Asia Pacific, 22 percent in the Americas and 17 percent across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. New products are stacking up too, from an automation tool for bookkeeping and forecasting to a blockchain venture aimed at tokenized financial products.

The competition is fierce and far larger. Stripe processed 1.9 trillion dollars in 2025, and rivals such as Ramp and Mercury are chasing the same globally distributed companies. Yet Zhang has already proven willing to bet against the obvious exit once, and the fortune he now holds rests on the simple insight he had over a batch of coffee beans, that the money lost in the gap between currencies was worth building a company to reclaim.