Business, now more than ever before, is going digital, and today a startup that’s building a vertically integrated solution to meet business banking needs is announcing a big round of funding to tap into the opportunity. Airwallex — which provides business banking services directly to businesses themselves as well as via a set of APIs that power other companies’ fintech products — has raised $200 million, a Series E round of funding that values the Australian startup at $4 billion.

Lone Pine Capital is leading the round, with new backers G Squared and Vetamer Capital Management, and previous backers 1835i Ventures (formerly ANZi), DST Global, Salesforce Ventures and Sequoia Capital China also participating.

The funding brings the total raised by Airwallex — which has head offices in Hong Kong and Melbourne, Australia — to $700 million, including a $100 million injection that closed out its Series D just six months ago.

Airwallex will be using the funding both to continue investing in its product and technology as well as to continue its geographical expansion and to focus on some larger business targets. The company has started to make some headway into Europe and the U.K. and that will be one big focus, along with the U.S.

The quick succession of funding and rising valuation underscore Airwallex’s traction to date around what CEO and co-founder Jack Zhang describes as a vertically integrated strategy.

That involves two parts. First, Airwallex has built all the infrastructure for the business banking services that it provides directly to businesses with a focus on small and medium enterprise customers. Second, it has packaged up that infrastructure into a set of APIs that a variety of other companies use to provide financial services directly to their customers without needing to build those services themselves — the so-called “embedded finance” approach.

“We want to own the whole ecosystem,” Zhang said to me. “We want to be like the Apple of business finance.”

That seems to be working out so far for Airwallex. Revenues were up almost 150% for the first half of 2021 compared to a year before, with the company processing more than US$20 billion for a global client portfolio that has quadrupled in size. In addition to tens of thousands of SMEs, it also, via APIs, powers financial services for other companies like GOAT, Papaya Global and Stake.

Airwallex got its start like many of the strongest startups do: It was built to solve a problem that the founders encountered themselves. In the case of Airwallex, Zhang tells me he had actually been working on a previous startup idea. He wanted to build the “Blue Bottle Coffee” of Asia Pacific out of Australia, and it involved buying and importing a lot of different materials, packaging and, of course, coffee from all around the world.

“We found that making payments as a small business was slow and expensive,” he said, since it involved banks in different countries and different banking systems, manual efforts to transfer money between them and many days to clear the payments. “But that was also my background — payments and trading — and so I decided that it was a much more fascinating problem for me to work on and resolve.”

Eventually one of his co-founders in the coffee effort came along, with the four co-founders of Airwallex ultimately including Zhang, along with Xijing Dai, Lucy Liu and Max Li.

It was 2014, and Airwallex got attention from VCs early on in part for being in the right place at the right time. A wave of startups building financial services for SMBs were definitely gaining ground in North America and Europe, filling a long-neglected hole in the technology universe, but there was almost nothing of the sort in the Asia Pacific region, and in those earlier days solutions were highly regionalized.

From there it was a no-brainer that starting with cross-border payments, the first thing Airwallex tackled, would soon grow into a wider suite of banking services involving payments and other cross-border banking services.

“In the last six years, we’ve built more than 50 bank integrations and now offer payments across 95 countries, payments through a partner network,” he added, with 43 of those offering real-time transactions. From that, it moved on to bank accounts and “other primitive stuff” with card issuance and more, he said, eventually building an end-to-end payment stack.

Airwallex has tens of thousands of customers using its financial services directly, and they make up about 40% of its revenues today. The rest is the interesting turn the company decided to take to expand its business.

Airwallex had built all of its technology from the ground up itself, and it found that — given the wave of new companies looking for more ways to engage customers and become their one-stop shop — there was an opportunity to package that tech up in a set of APIs and sell that on to a different set of customers, those who also provided services for small businesses. That part of the business now accounts for 60% of Airwallex’s business, Zhang said, and is growing faster in terms of revenues. (The SMB business is growing faster in terms of customers, he said.)

A lot of embedded finance startups that base their business around building tech to power other businesses tend to stay at arm’s length from offering financial services directly to consumers. The explanation I have heard is that they do not wish to compete against their customers. Zhang said that Airwallex takes a different approach, by being selective about the customers they partner with, so that the financial services they offer would not be in direct competition with those of its customers. The GOAT marketplace for sneakers, or Papaya Global’s HR platform are classic examples of this.

However, as Airwallex continues to grow, you can’t help but wonder whether one of those partners might like to gobble up all of Airwallex and take on some of that service provision role itself. In that context, it’s very interesting to see Salesforce Ventures returning to invest even more in the company in this round, given how widely the company has expanded from its early roots in software for salespeople into a massive platform providing a huge range of cloud services to help people run their businesses.

For now, it’s been the combination of its unique roots in Asia Pacific, plus its vertical approach of building its tech from the ground up, plus its retail acumen that has impressed investors and may well see Airwallex stay independent and grow for some time to come.

“Airwallex has a clear competitive advantage in the digital payments market,” said David Craver, MD at Lone Pine Capital, in a statement. “Its unique Asia-Pacific roots, coupled with its innovative infrastructure, products and services, speak volumes about the business’ global growth opportunities and its impressive expansion in the competitive payment providers space. We are excited to invest in Airwallex at this dynamic time, and look forward to helping drive the company’s expansion and success worldwide.”

Cape joins as a flagship partner of Basiq’s newly-released Startup Launchpad program

Sydney, 15th of September, 2021: Cape, the spend management platform issuing corporate cards, and CDR accredited Open Banking platform Basiq have today announced a new partnership to accelerate SME access to credit and tools to help them save time and money. 

Cape has joined as an exclusive flagship partner of Basiq’s newly-released Startup Launchpad. The program supports fintech innovators on their journey to scale, by helping qualifying early-stage startups access real-time financial data and access to Basiq’s suite of products for free. 

Integrating Basiq’s Open Banking technology into the Cape application and risk analysis process will allow prospective SME borrowers to seamlessly connect their business current

account to instantly verify their identity, account and income information with Cape. They plan to eliminate the need for customers to manually enter any details or send additional documentation to Cape, saving time and improving the customer experience. 

The partnership will also allow Cape’s customers to benefit from Basiq’s Open Banking technology by increasing the accuracy of the underwriting process by using real-time financial data. 

Damir Ćuća, Founder & CEO, Basiq, commented: 

“We’re proud to announce Cape as our flagship partner on the Startup Launchpad and look forward to seeing their journey. 

Basiq’s ability to verify account and transaction data in real-time will streamline the onboarding process for Cape’s business customers, as we work together to re-design business spending. 

This will set the standard for how all alternative finance lenders and banks can enhance the customer experience by utilising Open Banking technology to convert analogue processes to seamless digital journeys.” 

Ryan Edwards-Pritchard, Founder & CEO, Cape, commented: 

“We start as we mean to go on, our partnership with Basiq will help make it easier and faster for future customers to apply for our Cape products digitally. 

Open Banking technology offers a way to radically speed up the digital application process by offering instant decisions and personalised products. It also reduces the administrative burden on businesses when applying for credit or a change of terms. 

When looking for an Open Banking partner, Basiq was a clear favourite given they are the leading Australian open banking platform and a strong supporter of startups.” 

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About Cape 

Cape is building APAC’s first spend management platform that issues virtual corporate cards designed to help companies strengthen their cash flow. Cape provides businesses with full visibility and control on purchasing to cut wasteful spending and the time taken on financial administration work relating to expense management. 

Cape will be launching its business credit card in the coming months. Founders, CFO’s & Accountants interested in learning more should download the Cape waitlist App from the Apple App Store & Android Playstore. 

www.hellocape.com 

About Basiq

Basiq is a CDR-accredited Open Banking platform that provides the building blocks of financial services. Our APIs enable secure access to customer financial data and tools to uncover valuable insights. Backed by AP Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Reinventure, NAB Ventures and Plaid, over 200 fintechs and banks rely on our platform to deliver innovative financial solutions across lending, payments, wealth, digital banking and more. 

https://basiq.io 

Media contact
Ryan Edwards-Pritchard, ryan@hellocape.com, +61 (0)406 252 332