Airwallex in the money with $108m raise
Melbourne-based fintech start-up Airwallex has closed the second-largest fundraising round in Australian start-up history, taking in $US80 million ($108 million) for a Series B round led by Chinese conglomerate Tencent Holdings, alongside Sequoia Capital China and Melbourne’s Square Peg Capital.
The company, which was founded by five Chinese-Australian 30-somethings, has built a system to enable cross-border payments by combining payments and foreign exchange transfers into a single transaction.
In 2017 it raised $US19 million ($26 million) from the same investors, but it has now also added two more backers from China’s booming venture capital scene in Hillhouse Capital and Hong Kong-based Horizons Ventures, as well as Indonesia’s Central Capital Ventura. It takes Airwallex’s total fundraising to $US102 million ($138 million).
Mastercard, whose ‘Send’ personal payments platform is powered in part by Airwallex, is an existing investor. Its stake could be seen as a “beachhead” into the Chinese market, from which it and fellow payments giant Visa are effectively locked out.
Figures from Internet DealBook place the Airwallex raise as second only to the $US250 million raised by Sydney-based email marketing firm Campaign Monitor in 2014 from US backers led by Insight Venture Partners.
It is significantly larger than the next-biggest of 2018 so far, which is the $60 million round banked by SafetyCulture in May.
To read more, please click on the link below…
