Back in 2017, Airwallex's co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang told me on stage at a LaunchVic event in Melbourne that “there’s not many VCs in Australia”, and ambitious local startups like his would inevitably need to look overseas for the capital required to scale globally.
Sure enough, Airwallex did move overseas shortly after that interview. But eight years on, Australia does have substantial VC money. And ironically, the three biggest venture firms — long-time backer Square Peg, Airtree and Blackbird — are all now invested in Airwallex, which is ostensibly a foreign company.
Overnight, it raised USD300 million ($465 million) from the big three and a host of other investors in a deal that values the fintech at close to $10 billion and sets the stage for an IPO in the next 12 months.
The Zhang interview took place just after Airwallex had closed its Series A round led by China's Tencent and Sequoia Capital China. In it, he was candid about the Australian ecosystem's limitations. "Part of the reason [is] because there's not many startups, and the ecosystem is not mature enough," he said at the time.
