Airwallex co-founder on the journey from Melbourne cafe to unicorn status
For Airwallex co-founder Lucy Liu, dissolving borders has always come naturally.
For Airwallex co-founder Lucy Liu, dissolving borders has always come naturally.
The Airwallex co-founder and president was born in China, finished high school in Auckland and studied finance in Melbourne before founding what is now a US $6.2 billion fintech.
It telegraphs the worldview that underpins the business Liu has spent the last decade building: that even a single-person startup should operate globally from day one.
Airwallex’s origin story has been told often, but Liu still finds energy in the details. In 2015 her friends Jack Zhang and Max Li were running a small Melbourne café on the side of their other ventures.
“They had to make payments for packaging and supplies to various different suppliers. And the only choice they had at that time was a bank or Western Union. Which was very complicated.”
Paying packaging suppliers in China meant three-day settlement, a 4-to-5 per cent FX spread and a SWIFT fee on top.
She was on a sabbatical at the time, “just travelling everywhere”, yet wrote a personal seed cheque to the fledgling startup because the gap seemed too obvious to ignore.
“Why can't we build something that's much more simplified for businesses? At a time when cloud and mobile technologies were already advancing rapidly, it didn’t make sense that fintech was still stuck.”
Liu freely admits that the team’s first product, a cloud-based invoicing tool didn’t quite hit the product market fit mark but reflects it laid the foundation for future success.
Merchants who tried it kept asking for something adjacent: a way to push thousands of micro-payouts to teachers, creators or ride-share drivers spread across dozens of countries. “We switched from ‘invoice me’ to ‘pay them’, and suddenly the Lego pieces snapped together,” Liu says.
Once they committed to the pivot 2018 Airwallex could provision multi-currency accounts to a seller in minutes. Liu calls that year “crazy amazing”; the market called it unicorn status in 2019.
Almost a decade in, Airwallex moves more than $100b USD annually billion a year for 150, 000 customers. The company’s pitch has widened from low-cost FX to what Liu calls the future of banking: multi-currency wallets, spend management, treasury yield, and an embedded-finance suite that lets platforms “build their own PayPal”.
Sign-up friction is identical whether the applicant is a Christchurch design studio or a Fortune 500 marketplace. While of course more complex requirements for large ventures can be catered to, Airwallex believes in equal access first, tailored complexity after.
So a small business owner in Tauranga can sell on Etsy all weekend, collect sterling, and leave it unconverted until rates make sense with no branch visit to a traditional bank required.
A Wellington SaaS can charge U.S. dollars natively and pay contractors in pesos or rupees from the same dashboard. “A modern business can be global from day one,” Liu argues, “but they never get a global-business service from their bank.” Airwallex wants to be that default operating system.
The economics support her confidence. May’s US $300 million Series F round, led by existing backers Square Peg, DST Global and Visa Ventures, lifted the company’s valuation to US $6.2 billion. Remarkably higher than its 2022 mark-to-market in a year most private fintechs accepted flat or down rounds.
For readers looking to borrow playbook pages, Liu says principles matter more than product features. First, timing. “If we’d tried this ten years earlier the tech stack wasn’t ready; ten years later the window might have closed,” she says.
Once the window opened, speed became non-negotiable. The company shipped payment acceptance and card issuing in the same nine-month cycle, cannibalising its own Series B proceeds. “You can’t drip-feed capabilities in fintech,” she says. “End-to-end is what earns trust.”
Second, founders should be sceptical of the idea that they can attain the mythical ‘work life balance’.
“I hate to say it, but there is no work-life balance,” Liu tells me.
Instead she talks about work-life integration: staying engaged and focused at work while leaning on support networks, from friends to family and particularly, co-founders who provide complementary skills and, when needed, blunt dissent.
And applying the same lens of work-life integration to staff culture helps create a shared sense of mission across the company even as you scale rapidly.
“Capability is the baseline; personality determines growth potential. We look for people who also can align their personal growth with the company's growth.”
Even with a distributed workforce in 26 offices, cohesion comes from a shared alignment to the Airwallex’s mission.
“We all say to people, think about the why. When people are aligned with the why of the business, and the real reason why we're building it, it becomes easier to scale, and it also becomes easier for people to feel they are really contributing to the growth.”
It would be impossible to interview a fintech founder in 2025 without throwing the obligatory AI question. Liu’s answer is refreshingly utilitarian. “AI isn’t a revolution; it’s an evolution,” she says.
Airwallex currently uses large language models to understand clients during onboarding and determine which services to offer. To Liu, hype begins the moment a startup leads with the model, not the user outcome. “If AI doesn’t actually make the experience better, it’s pointless,” Liu says,
“How do the tools actually improve your operational efficiency and how does it actually make your team operate better? It's not just about using it on the front end that your customers see, but also how it's integrated into the back end as well.”
For a country where founders can potentially hit domestic ceilings early, Liu’s career maps a credible route to escape velocity. Launch borderless, worry about territory later. Invest in infrastructure that newcomers will find most tedious to copy. Recruit people whose personalities align with your mission and be upfront about the hard work ahead.
Finally, remember that a missed window is the real unicorn killer.
When the timing is right, optimise for speed. A mistake can become a lesson but hesitation sees you left behind.