The Melbourne headquarted fintech Airwallex has bagged a $13 million, Series A round of funding to kick-start the expansion of its online payment system across Asia pacific and into Europe.
Certain big-name investors in the global commerce led this deal. The investors include the Chinese internet giant Tencent, tech VC firm Sequoia Capital China and the famous card issuer Mastercard. The 45-year-old Sequoia which is famous for investing in huge tech brands like Apple, Google, and AirBnB backed the round in Airwallex, making its Chinese arm’s first investment.
Founded last year, fintech Airwallex is tackling the mainstream problem of foreign exchange transaction across borders. Airwallex allows the businesses to make and receive the international payment at scale and that too at lower cost and with less hassle. TransferWise the consumer focused service of Airwallex opened an Asia Pacific HQ last week.
However, apart from quick and easy payment service, the Melbourne fintech is forging relationships with trading partners. The start-up used the $3 million raised last summer to make sound trading partners. This would help its customers save money on their cross-border transactions.
Airwallex is at an affirmative status-quo to gain access to a license in China for an overseas transaction. If done, this would be a first-rate achievement for the fintech as many multinationals such as Western Union even failed to secure.
CEO Jack Zhang tells TechCrunch that they have been successful in making settlement and reconciliation very easy but their customers can also enjoy institutional FX prices to save their money. The fintech is already working is the internet giant Tencent to lower the back-end costs for WeChat Pay services.
Image source: Airwallex
However, Airwallex will majorly deal with financial institutions and firms that do heavy scale transactions. The company says that they already have two clients that will carry out scale transactions. Airwallex is targeting more such customers recently.
According to Zhang, their product can still accommodate lot of improvements. Consequently, it will get easier to adopt as compared to now. The company, however, will use the 30% of the funds for this purpose. The other 70 % will be utilized for market expansion globally; especially in Europe and Singapore, Zhang told Business Insider.
For the businesses that operate across borders, foreign exchange transactions are a real challenge. Airwallex has seriously impressed with its capability to tackle the problem and close the gap. This allows companies to financially access markets that were out of their reach previously, backer Sequoia partner Steven Ji stated.
In July, last year the fintech scored $4 million which it calls as pre-series A round from Gobi partners- the investment manager of Chinese e-commerce Alibaba and a group of other angel investors.
Fintech Airwallex is leveraging in an area which is elaborately complex. Moreover, Jack Zhang says that now with excelling the number of trade partnerships and financial services licences the company has an ultimate aim to make international payments cheap and simple so as domestic ones.
