Airwallex

About the Company

In 2015, our CEO Jack Zhang and three fellow entrepreneurs launched a café in Melbourne. Beyond a desire to sell great coffee, the café was a laboratory to test and learn around a rising global trend in retail, where the initial presence may be local, but the mindset and scaling ambition is global.

As the founders worked to build a supply chain that was smooth, efficient and without unnecessary costs, they quickly discovered the friction points that eventually became the problem Airwallex would aim to solve. Jack often tells the story of purchasing pallets of coffee cups, lunch boxes and other paper goods from China. They spent around US$10K on the supplies, and had to pay the company through a remittances company that charged 4.5 percent. The cost of FX conversion was painful – as was the time it took to transfer funds.

They fundamentally believed something better must be possible. That’s when Airwallex was born, as the founders set out to build a financial infrastructure to support operations that transcend borders.