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Published on 25 June 20263 minutes

The AI Era Has No Home Market. Build Accordingly.

Jack Zhang
Co-founder and CEO of Airwallex

The AI Era Has No Home Market. Build Accordingly.

Today, we're announcing a new round of financing at an $11 billion valuation, led by Addition, with participation from Baillie Gifford, Hummingbird, QED Investors, T.Rowe Price, Hedosophia, Haun Ventures, and Amex Ventures. We raised it because we believe this is one of the most consequential moments in the history of global finance, and we intend to build accordingly.

AI is collapsing the operational gap between a well-resourced company and someone with a laptop and a strong idea. The tools that once required large, sometimes global teams — marketing, operations, customer support — are now accessible to individual founders through AI agents. The next generation of founders won't have to sequence their way into global markets. They'll sign their first customer in San Francisco, source from Seoul, and contract in Lagos before making their first full-time hire. The whole world will be their staging ground.

But this is only possible with the right financial infrastructure. Moving money across borders, managing multi-currency accounts, staying compliant across dozens of jurisdictions aren't problems you can prompt your way out of. They require licenses, banking relationships, and direct integrations with local payment networks in every market that matters. We have spent ten years building proprietary infrastructure that includes 85+ licenses, direct integrations into 160 local payment networks, and payout capabilities to virtually every country in the world (200+).

Now, through the support of our investors, we are building the intelligent layer on top. Today, I’m delighted to announce new product initiatives from Airwallex:

T:0: Your autonomous finance department from Day Zero

The area we’re most excited about is autonomous finance. If AI is going to reshape how businesses are built and run, finance cannot remain a patchwork of point solutions, spreadsheets, outside firms, and manual work. It has to become intelligent, continuous, and native to how modern companies operate.

That is why we are introducing T:0, an AI-native platform designed to run the complete finance function of a business end to end. Whereas legacy systems were retrofitted with AI, T:0 was built from first principles as an agentic finance layer to automate bookkeeping, forecasting, taxes, compliance, and reporting from day zero. Designed to give founders get CFO-grade books with compliance built in, and no migration required.

T:0 is a standalone project founded by Lance Co Ting Keh, who joined Airwallex through the acquisition of OpenPay. Lance has spent more than a decade building applied AI systems, leading research and engineering teams at Google X, Cresta and Box. He and the T:0 team have been building in close partnership with our customers and operating with the speed and intensity of an early-stage startup. 

We plan to foster more projects like T:0 inside and alongside Airwallex, where exceptional founders and small teams have autonomy to build at the speed of AI, while benefiting from the global infrastructure, regulatory foundation, and distribution we have spent the last decade building.

T:0 is now in private beta and will be widely available in the coming weeks.

Airi: Agentic Commerce Needs a Wallet

Airi is launching this week as one-click checkout, delivering a 14% conversion uplift for merchants in early testing. The larger story is what Airi will soon become: our agentic consumer wallet. 

Agentic commerce is already here. AI systems are executing purchases and moving funds on behalf of businesses. What the agentic economy needs is a wallet — a regulated, global conduit for AI agents to access and transact with fiat or stablecoins on someone's behalf. That is what Airi is. Over time, it will extend to include agentic card issuing, spend limits, permission controls, and multi-currency balances.

This is just the start of the agentic commerce future we’re building for merchants and consumers. Pairing Airi with our protocol-agnostic Agentic Commerce Suite, which makes products more transactable for agents, will give merchants new capabilities to make agentic commerce tangible and drive recurring revenue. Together, these solutions will complete a full agentic commerce loop between builders, merchants, and shoppers on Airwallex’s regulated rails. 

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We didn't know it at the time, but the foundation we spent ten years building turns out to be precisely the kind of infrastructure that the agentic economy needs. Thanks to AI, the answer to "who gets to build a global company" is anyone. We're building the infrastructure to make that true.

Jack Zhang
Co-founder and CEO of Airwallex

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