Airwallex, which was recently valued at $5.5 billion and is backed by Tencent, has been considered one of the leading fintech IPO candidates.
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TencentPayments-backed startup Airwallex is approaching $500 million in annual revenue and will be ready for an initial public offering in 2026, CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang told CNBC in an exclusive interview.
“I think the next milestone is $1 billion. I hope we can reach it in 2026, or 2027. This is our goal,” said Zhang, in response to a question about what the Singapore-based company will do after approaching $500. million ARR milestone.
Run rate is a rough measure of how much revenue a company will make in a year, based on its monthly performance.
Zhang said Airwallex has seen significant growth in its business in the past year, driven by expansion into developed markets such as Europe, the UK and North America.
In the Americas, Airwallex increased its revenue by more than 300% annually, according to figures shared with CNBC.
The UK, Europe, and North America now account for more than 35% of Airwallex’s overall transaction volume, Zhang said.
When asked by CNBC about his feelings about the prospect of an IPO for his business, Zhang said: “For us, it’s just about preparing for an IPO in the next two years so we have a choice to go or not.”
“In 2025, we will prepare everything, and we can decide what to do after 2026,” he said.
Airwallex crossed $100 billion in annual payment processing volume this year, Zhang said, marking a 73% increase from last year. This is because the company is seeing high volumes across all products, including payments, foreign exchange, payments, and issuance.
“It took us nine years to cross the $100 billion market,” Zhang said. “I hope it will not take less than a year to reach $200 billion.
Using ‘AI workers’ to reduce costs
Zhang added that Airwallex does not prioritize making annual net profit because of its current growth – but the company is looking for ways to reduce costs. Artificial intelligence, he said, has helped Airwallex make its employees more productive and also save costs.
For example, he says Airwallex is experimenting with 11x, a company that gives other businesses access to digital “AI workers,” to replace a key part of its sales development representatives (SDRs) — staff focused on managing sales leads.
The experiment has only recently gone live, he said, but Zhang is so confident about the adoption of AI agents to perform the day-to-day work of SDRs that he estimates it could replace 70% of those types of employees. in Airwallex.
He emphasized that while some roles will be effectively replaced by AI, most will be enhanced by the technology as Airwallex’s sales team will be able to do more with less.
Airwallex, which was recently valued at $5.5 billion and is backed by Tencent, has been considered one of the main fintech IPO candidates. But Zhang said that the mood in the financial technology industry is still particularly sour, for the moment.
“Investor perception is still not good and still conservative,” Zhang told CNBC. “It’s been going on for about three years. Nothing much has changed.”
However, he added: “Fintech is a huge market. You see big companies like Nubank, Revolut, Stripe, Adyen keep up the good work.”
“Investors will still choose the right company to invest in. We just need to ensure that Airwallex is number one in global payments in the financial space,” said Zhang.
