Airwallex, which was recently valued at $5.6 billion and is backed by Tencent, is considered one of many prominent fintech IPO candidates.
Jose Sarmento | Bloomberg | Getty Images
TencentIn an exclusive interview with CNBC, CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang said that Airwallex, a payments startup backed by fintech companies on January 17, 2019, has reached $500 million in annual revenue and plans to be its first-ever by 2026. Get ready for a public offering.
“I think the next big milestone is $1 billion,” Zhang said in response to a question about the Singaporean company’s next steps after hitting the $500 million ARR milestone last month. “Hopefully we can get there in 2026 or 2027. That’s the goal.”
Run rate is a rough measure of how much revenue a company makes in a year, based on monthly performance.
Mr Zhang said Airwallex’s business had achieved significant growth last year, driven by expansion in developed markets such as the UK, Europe and North America.
According to data shared by CNBC, in the Americas, Airwallex’s revenue has increased by more than 300% year-on-year.
Zhang said the UK, Europe and North America currently account for more than 35% of Airwallex’s total transaction volume.
When asked by CNBC what he thought about the company’s IPO prospects, Zhang said: “For us, it’s just about getting ready for an IPO in the next two years so we can choose to go or not.”
“In 2025, we will have everything ready, and only after 2026 can we decide what to do,” he added.
Airwallex’s annual payment processing volume exceeded $100 billion this year, a 73% increase from last year, Zhang said. At the same time, transaction volumes are growing across all of the company’s products, including payments, foreign exchange, disbursements and issuance.
“It took us nine years to cross the $100 billion mark,” Zhang said. “Hopefully it will reach $200 billion in less than a year.”
Harnessing “artificial intelligence workers” to cut costs
Although the company achieved monthly profits in December 2023 and January this year, it is still in the red.
Zhang said Airwallex does not prioritize achieving annual net profits given its current growth rate, but the company has found ways to reduce costs.
He said artificial intelligence is helping Airwallex improve employee productivity, while ultimately allowing the business to do more with less.
For example, he said Airwallex is trialling 11x, a company that provides digital services to other businesses.”artificial intelligence worker,” to replace a large portion of sales development representatives (SDRs)—employees focused on managing sales leads.
The pilot program only recently came online, he said. But Zhang is confident in adopting artificial intelligence agents to undertake the daily work of SDRs, and he believes they can replace up to 70% of the roles in their business with artificial intelligence.
However, Zhang stressed that while some roles will actually be replaced by artificial intelligence, most will be enhanced through the technology as Airwallex’s sales team will be able to increase their productivity.
For example, one SDR can manage 5 virtual SDRs.
Airwallex, which was recently valued at $5.6 billion and is backed by Tencent, is considered one of a number of major fintech IPO candidates.
But Zhang said the current sentiment in the fintech industry is still largely pessimistic.
“Investor sentiment is still not good and still conservative,” Zhang told CNBC. “This has been going on for about three years. Nothing has really changed that much.”
However, he added: “Fintech is a very big market. You will see big companies like Nubank, Revolut, Stripe, etc. Adien Keep up the great work.
“Investors will still choose the right company to invest. We just need to ensure that Airwallex becomes the number one global payment company in the financial field,” Zhang said.
