Stripe Once Tried to Buy Airwallex for $1.2 Billion. Now They're Going to War.

Stripe Once Tried to Buy Airwallex for $1.2 Billion. Now They're Going to War. In 2018, Jack Zhang — co-founder and CEO of a three-year-old Australian payments startup called Airwallex — flew to Shanghai to meet Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe. The Irish payments giant had made a $1.2 billion acquisition offer on the table. Airwallex, at the time, was generating just $2 million in revenue. Zhang said no. Seven years on, that decision looks like one of the most consequential calls in fintech history. Airwallex is now valued at $8 billion, has raised over $1.2 billion in total funding, holds nearly 90 regulatory licences across 70–80 countries, and has just launched a direct assault on Stripe's core payments business. The company that Stripe once tried to absorb is now the one coming for its market. The Billion-Dollar Rejection The details of the 2018 meetings are now well documented. Stripe's CFO Will Gaybrick first reached out to Airwallex through their mutual investor Sequoia Capital. The offer on the table totalled $1.2 billion — $860 million for Airwallex's investors and $200 million earmarked for its founders. Senior management from both companies met in Shanghai. Teams exchanged visits to each other's headquarters in Melbourne and San Francisco. A preliminary agreement was drafted and internal data was shared. Prominent Sequoia investor Michael Moritz reportedly encouraged Zhang to accept. For most founders, a billion-dollar exit with only $2 million in annual revenue would be the end of the story. Zhang turned it down anyway — believing the offer undervalued what Airwallex was building and that its potential was far greater than the price reflected. He was right. In the year after rejecting Stripe's offer, Airwallex raised $100 million in a funding round backed by Tencent, Square Peg Capital, and Sequoia, reaching unicorn status and becoming the fastest Australian company ever to hit a $1 billion valuation. How Airwallex Built Its Edge The rejection launched nearly a decade of parallel — and increasingly competitive — development. While Stripe focused on building out its developer-friendly payment processing platform primarily for online businesses, Airwallex took a different path: deep, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction infrastructure for cross-border financial operations. The result is a platform built differently from the ground up. Airwallex now holds direct connections to local payment networks in over 120 countries and can settle transactions in more than 90 currencies. Its regulatory licences — painfully acquired over years in markets like Japan, South Korea, and China — allow it to hold, convert, and deploy funds locally in ways that Stripe and Square structurally cannot. "Stripe and Square can process payments in Japan," CEO Jack Zhang told TechCrunch, "but when you actually process the payment, you need to immediately pay out to the merchant's bank account. You can't hold the funds." Airwallex's Japanese licence — which took seven years to obtain — enables it to do exactly that. This is not a product difference. It is an infrastructure difference, and it is not easily replicated. The POS Offensive — Taking the Fight to Stripe's Front Door In April 2026, Airwallex made its most aggressive move yet: launching a point-of-sale product that allows businesses to accept in-person payments across multiple countries through a single platform. Until now, in-person payments — the physical countertop — had been the exclusive territory of Stripe Terminal, Square, and Adyen. Airwallex has just walked into that room. The product does something no rival currently offers at scale: it allows a multinational merchant to run stores in different countries on the same payment infrastructure, with unified reporting and reconciliation, without onboarding a different local vendor in every market. "When a business expands into a new market, they typically have to onboard a new local acquirer, navigate fragmented compliance, and manage yet another set of vendor relationships," Zhang said at launch. Airwallex's pitch is that its decade of cross-border infrastructure building eliminates that problem entirely. The move is significant because it closes the last gap in Airwallex's product stack. The company had already acquired subscription billing startup OpenPay to take on Stripe Billing directly, and had been building embedded finance and global business account products. With POS now added, Airwallex is no longer a specialist cross-border payments tool — it is a full-stack challenger to Stripe across online payments, in-person payments, billing, treasury, and business banking simultaneously. "There's just not been a real competition to Stripe in the last 15 years, which is quite amazing considering how big the market is," Zhang said. He intends to be that competition. What This Means for Businesses For companies operating across multiple countries, this rivalry is good news. The payments market has lacked a credible challenger to Stripe's dominance for over a decade, which has meant limited pressure on pricing, product innovation, and the complexity of managing cross-border vendor relationships. Airwallex's expansion forces Stripe to compete harder in the international segment — either by matching Airwallex's infrastructure depth or by acquiring its way to comparable local licences. Either outcome benefits global merchants. For businesses evaluating their payments stack in 2026, the calculus is shifting. Stripe remains the default for US-first or developer-led companies building primarily online. But for multinationals, businesses with physical presences in multiple markets, and companies where cross-border settlement costs and delays are meaningful, Airwallex is now a genuinely credible alternative — and in some markets, the structurally superior one. Digital8Hub (digital8hub.com) covers the evolving fintech landscape, including payments infrastructure, business banking, and the technology decisions that shape how money moves globally. For the latest on Stripe, Airwallex, and the future of business payments, visit digital8hub.com. Sources & Further Reading: - TechCrunch: Airwallex is about to take on Stripe and the rest of the payments industry — in the physical world (April 15, 2026) - Tech Funding News: Airwallex raises $330M Series G at $8B valuation - Tech Funding News: Airwallex acquires OpenPay to take on Stripe Billing - The VC Corner: Airwallex — The Outsider That Built a Billion-Dollar Fintech Empire - Wikipedia: Airwallex - ITMunch: Airwallex said no thank you to a takeover bid by Stripe - Digital8Hub Finance & Fintech Coverage: digital8hub.com