Airwallex grew from the personal struggle of its Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Jack Zhang, who said long work weeks shaped both his survival and his business outlook. As a teenager who moved alone from Qingdao to Melbourne, Zhang worked up to four blue-collar jobs at a time to fund his computer science degree after his family faced financial trouble. As he said in a recent interview, “I’ve worked 100 hours a week from the age of 16 for 20 plus years,” and added that during those years, “either you survive or not.” That discipline carried into his career, and today he still works about 80 hours a week at Airwallex, which reached an $8 billion valuation by December 2025.
Zhang founded the company in 2015 after running a coffee shop with Co-Founder Max Li and discovering how slow and costly cross-border payments were. “We thought, why can’t we build a payment system in parallel to SWIFT and fundamentally change how money moves around the world?” he said. With early backing from Lucy Liu and other university peers, the business expanded quickly. By the end of last year, Airwallex passed $1 billion in annualized run-rate revenue. Zhang said, “We think we can generate at least $10 billion in revenue by 2030,” setting a new financial target for the company’s next phase.
