Highbeam scales to $5B+ in annual transactions by embedding Airwallex's global financial infrastructure
How do you serve hundreds of consumer brands without building global payment rails? Highbeam embedded Airwallex's financial infrastructure and scaled to $5B+ in annual transactions.
Highbeam uses AI to give eCommerce and consumer brands real-time visibility into their cash, alongside the credit they need to grow. In doing so, Highbeam works toward its mission of making entrepreneurship profitable.
Industry
Fintech & financial services
Location
New York, NY
Company size
11–50 employees
Airwallex Products Used
An AI-powered platform built for modern consumer brands
Highbeam is a New York-based fintech company building an AI-powered finance platform for eCommerce and omni-channel consumer brands. Founded by Samir Shergill and Gautam Gupta, Highbeam’s mission is to “make entrepreneurship profitable” – giving brand founders real-time cash flow insights and flexible lines of credit designed specifically for how modern consumer brands operate.
As these brands expand across Shopify, Amazon, and wholesale channels, their cash moves in and out of currencies and across borders faster than traditional tools can track. Most founders are left stitching together banking, spreadsheets, and dashboards that were never designed for this level of complexity.
Highbeam set out to fix that by building an AI-powered command center for founders. By embedding Airwallex’s global financial infrastructure, Highbeam now manages over $5B in annual cash transactions without building payment rails from scratch and has raised $47M in total funding, including a $30M Series A led by Acrew Capital.
The challenge: payments and compliance couldn’t keep up with growth
Managing mission-critical payments for hundreds of brands
As Highbeam grew to serve hundreds of consumer brands, the volume and complexity of payments on its platform surged. Manual oversight could no longer keep up with thousands of payouts, each subject to potential compliance checks and customer follow-ups.
"Because our merchants are sending hundreds and thousands of payments, any step of the chain can trigger a compliance check to understand what has happened that can interrupt that payment," said Samir Shergill, Highbeam's Co-founder & CEO. "That requires a lot of manual effort to constantly stay on track of where each payment is, how they're moving."
The need for a trusted compliance and payments partner
As the financial operating layer for their customers, Highbeam could not afford to manage compliance for every payment flow in-house. They needed a partner to own that complexity so the team could focus on product innovation.
Samir Shergill
Co-founder & CEO, Highbeam
"We don't want to be in the business of managing the compliance for every payment flow. We want a partner we can trust to do that so we can focus on what we do best."
The data challenge: feeding AI with clean, real-time cashflow insights
Highbeam's differentiation is its AI – finance teammates and intelligent agents that help consumer brand founders make better decisions in real time. But for AI to work effectively, it needs trusted, reliable data. Before Airwallex, getting payment and cash flow data at the speed and quality that Highbeam needed was a bottleneck.
“One thing we’ve learned is that for AI to operate most effectively, it has to understand the context of what it’s trying to do, and then have the best possible data to achieve that,” Samir explained.
The solution: embedded global infrastructure behind every Highbeam transaction
Embedding Airwallex's global infrastructure into the Highbeam platform
Highbeam integrated Airwallex's Platform APIs and Global Treasury network directly into its product, enabling connected-account onboarding, cross-border payouts, and post-funded FX at scale. Rather than stitching together multiple providers, Highbeam now has a single, reliable infrastructure partner powering the financial flows that underpin its entire platform.
“For us, international payments are mission-critical,” said Samir. “We needed a partner whose APIs let us configure, monitor, and scale those flows with technology instead of manual work.”
Compliance and responsiveness at the speed of founders
One of the most important requirements for Highbeam was a partner that could respond on their timetable – not the next day. Airwallex's ability to react quickly to compliance queries and payment issues has been central to the partnership.
Samir Shergill
Co-founder & CEO, Highbeam
"Airwallex fundamentally understands the speed at which we need to operate."
Trusted data to power better AI
Highbeam's models need a clean, current picture of how money is moving. Airwallex delivers it through the same APIs that move the payments, so the team can spend its time building the models rather than sourcing and reconciling the inputs.
"Airwallex gives us access to trusted data that we didn't have access to before, so we can build better AI to solve better customer needs,” said Samir.
The results: faster growth, deeper deposits, and higher card spend
Scaling to $5B+ in annual transactions
With Airwallex as its embedded financial infrastructure partner, Highbeam now manages over $5B in annual cash transactions for hundreds of consumer brands. Since the partnership began, the platform has seen 3x growth in GMV, 3.5x growth in deposits, and 5x growth in integrated products such as card spend year-over-year – all powered by real-time, trusted payment data flowing into Highbeam’s AI models.
Freeing the team to build what matters
By trusting Airwallex to manage the complexity of global payments and compliance, Highbeam's team has been able to stay focused on what they do best: building innovative financial technology for founders.
