Airwallex dives deep into AI services and is now worth $11 billion
The Australian fintech’s newest product gives company founders a full finance and CFO department powered by AI
Happy Friday and welcome back to Asia Tech Review, your curated digest to keep up to date with tech news across Asia.
There’s no immediate IPO plan for Australian fintech Airwallex. It announced a new round at an $11 billion valuation and jumped deep into AI with the launch of two new and unique services, including a full finance suite for startup founders. Over in Japan, another corporation is diving into crypto and digital assets via an acquisition.
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Before we go this week: RIP Om Malik, the prolific blogger passed away on Wednesday. I remember reading his posts when I first got started working in tech more than 20 years ago.
Airwallex doubles down on AI after raising $320 million
We’re used to seeing Airwallex raise money and the Australia-headquartered fintech is at it again after it announced a $320 million Series H round at a valuation of $11 billion.
The round is led by Addition, the fund from former Tiger Global executive Lee Fixel. Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T. Rowe Price, Hedosophia, Haun Ventures, Washington University in St. Louis and Amex Ventures all joined.
More interesting than the money, however, is what Airwallex is doing next.
The company announced a new AI-powered product called T0 that’s designed to offer a full financial department to startups and new businesses. That ranges from bookkeeping and forecasting to taxes, compliance and reporting and it is “designed to give founders CFO-grade books with compliance built in and no migration required,” Airwallex explains.
CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang recently said that he believes that “AI is the greatest entrepreneurship unlock we’ve ever seen.” The company teased these products this week, with Zhang stating that solo founders can now run companies. Clearly, he believes T0 is a product that can make this happen.
Airwallex also launched its first agentic wallet, Airi, which allows companies to sell products and services to customers using AI agents. The company plans to add more features including permission controls, spend limits and multi-currency options.
These launches may not appear huge on the outside, but they represent a new push from Airwallex that will see the company delay its plans to go public. That was loosely targeted for 2026, according to comments from Zhang made a couple of years ago. Now he told Australian Financial Review that Airwallex’s commitment to spending on AI will make the company’s financials ill-suited for going public.
Airwallex claims to have been profitable since 2023. It released new stats today, including $1.3 billion in ARR, up 74% year-over-year, and $287 billion in annualized transaction volume, up more than 120%.
These new launches are notable as Airwallex is known to industry figures as a cross-border payments company, but it has been working to build more fintech and banking capabilities. When we spoke to Singapore fintech Aspire’s CEO in April, he forecast that it was only a matter of time before fintech embraced AI to offer much more sophisticated services to small companies. That’s exactly what Airwallex is shooting for here.
Japan’s SBI buys crypto exchange for $288 million
We’ve seen a number of crypto exchanges being sold to traditional finance institutions across Asia, including a $10 billion deal for the parent of Korea’s Upbit, and now Japan-based Bitbank is being bought by SBI, a financial services group formerly owned by SoftBank, for 46.7 billion yen, $288.6 million.
The goal of the deal is similar to other exchange acquisitions and that’s to expand SBI’s trading services to cover cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and other digital assets. Bitbank ranks among Japan’s top 10 exchanges based on trading volume, according to CoinGecko, with over $42 million in daily trading volume at the time of writing.
The increased adoption of stablecoins across Asia following regulation is enabling new use cases for exchanges, and that’s attracting the interest of traditional financial companies that see an opportunity to introduce a range of new trading services that tie into what they already offer.
New assets such as tokenised stocks, which are being pioneered by the likes of Coinbase and Binance, are also becoming attractive. These assets allow investors to assess stocks in harder-to-reach markets like Korea and Taiwan, where the likes of SK Hynix, Samsung and TSMC are surging thanks to the AI boom.
Deals
Kuaishou’s chip spin-off TranStreams raised an undisclosed Series A+ round led by QF Capital, with participation from a Beijing state-backed fund, Baidu Ventures, and Shenzhen-based payment tech firm XGD [South China Morning Post]
Hang Ten Systems, a new enterprise AI startup from former Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, raised $32 million in seed funding led by Mayfield with participation from Aramco Ventures [Economic Times]
India’s central government could end up with a 1-2% stake in AI startup Sarvam, valued at $1.5 billion, as part of its $300 million funding round [Economic Times]
South Korea’s Samsung SDI will invest $20 million in US battery startup Forge Nano and provide engineering support under a deal to secure domestically produced battery cells for the defense and aerospace sectors [Bloomberg]
There’s consolidation in the co-working industry after India’s Smartworks Coworking Spaces acquired Workstudio Spaces to expand its presence in Singapore [Entrackr]
Markets
We wrote about SK Hynix’s US listing plans and now NAND flash maker Kioxia, Japan’s most valuable company since June 12, plans to offer US depositary shares in spring 2027 [Bloomberg]
India’s Pocket FM is reportedly headed for IPO, but before getting there it has shut down its microdrama vertical in favour of focusing on audio [Economic Times]
AI and chips
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said the company is targeting China’s data centre market with chips designed specifically for Chinese customers and compliant with US export controls [Nikkei Asia]
DeepSeek is looking to at least double headcount across all departments, targeting technical and engineering roles [Bloomberg]
South Korea is set to unveil plans for a new chipmaking cluster, as a senior presidential adviser warned the country must rapidly expand production capacity to stay competitive in the AI boom [Nikkei Asia]
In other news:
We previously said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is on an India tour this week and he announced a commitment to spend $13 billion on AI and cloud infrastructure by 2030, as part of a bigger package that Amazon claims to be worth $48 billion [Amazon]
Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force used China-linked virus-infected USB drives on classified systems for nearly a year and chose not to disclose the breach, internal documents show [Nikkei Asia]