Airwallex president Lucy Liu on the company’s plans to be ‘IPO-ready’
· Fortune
Nicholas Gordon here. When is Airwallex, the Australian-born payments company, planning to go public? The company, which serves over 675,000 businesses and claims to have over $1 billion in annualized run rate revenue, once talked about having a U.S. IPO in 2026, but those plans have gotten fuzzier over time.
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In a recent conversation for our new Asia Agenda series, president Lucy Liu told me that the firm still plans to be “IPO-ready” by the end of the year, but added that it’s “just not the best time, given how complicated things are.”
One can’t blame her for thinking that way. 2026 already boasts two key IPOs—SpaceX’s $85.7 billion debut and SK Hynix’s $26.5 billion ADR sale—and potentially a third in Anthropic’s. (OpenAI is reportedly considering a debut in 2027.)
And it’s not just the U.S. Shanghai has already had one blockbuster IPO, in ChangXin Memory Technologies’ $9.8 billion listing. And Alibaba just tapped Hong Kong’s equity markets for a $10 billion share sale.
A smaller company–even one as buzzy as Airwallex–might get lost in the shuffle as bigger investors hold on to their cash.
Other startups have delayed their IPO plans. Travel platform Klook filed for a New York IPO last November. The company originally scheduled it for the end of 2025, then delayed it until early 2026, and has remained studiously quiet since then. (Klook’s founder Ethan Lin declined to comment on the company’s IPO plans when my colleague Angelica Ang spoke to him earlier this year.)
But it’s also not clear that companies like Airwallex need to go public right now. The company raised $330 million in December, and then raised another $320 million in June. “We just want to be able to have enough capital to fast-charge our plans,” Liu told me, as the company barrels into agentic commerce and automated bookkeeping.
“Investors are going more towards later-stage investments,” Liu added. “It’s not that they don’t have capital. They just want to see success, right? They want to see a track record before they deploy capital into that particular company.”
Airwallex’s June funding round was a “Series H” round, which isn’t that ridiculous in the world of tech anymore. Databricks is reportedly putting together a Series M round, amid social media jokes that these funding rounds are soon going to run out of letters.
Liu’s story with Airwallex starts in 2015, when she met fellow cofounders Jack Zhang and Max Li; she eventually offered them $1 million in seed capital, twice what they’d asked for. She noted to me that she had a “bit of an overconfidence situation” at the start: “I would be on a plane almost every other day.”
Now, the company is pushing into markets like Mexico, South Korea, Brazil and, importantly, the U.S. It recently moved its headquarters from Australia—which Liu admitted is “quite small” for companies thinking of going global—to Singapore and San Francisco.
That headquarters shift is meant to help its path into the U.S., which hasn’t entirely been smooth. Last November, venture capitalist Keith Rabois (who sits on the board of Ramp, a competitor) called Airwallex a “Chinese backdoor into sensitive American data.” That accusation got picked up by Senator Tom Cotton, who claimed the startup’s “ties to Communist China run deep,” and called for a CFIUS investigation.
Airwallex has pushed back against the claims. CEO Jack Zhang has called them “false,” noted that its China-based staff can’t access U.S. data, and added that third-party companies were hired to audit its data security practices. (Liu, in our conversation, pointed to previous statements by Airwallex.)
So, Zhang, Liu, and Airwallex’s cofounders can probably afford to wait until things settle down before getting an IPO on the calendar.
But there’s a risk in waiting too long: Just look at Shein, and the 75% haircut it’s taking on its valuation—or Airtable, which never went public and sold at an 80% discount to Bending Spoons. Airwallex can afford to wait, but perhaps not forever.
See you tomorrow,
Nicholas Gordon
X: @nickrigordon
Email: [email protected]
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com