Jack Zhang

Airwallex was founded by its CEO Jack Zhang and four friends after a personal experience of paying exorbitant foreign exchange fees for online purchases. The company, founded in Melbourne and headquartered in Hong Kong, is a global payments platform that helps businesses manage and make international payments quickly, transparently, and cost-efficiently, without the constraints of the traditional financial system. It’s a simple idea but a much-needed one, and it has caught fire accordingly, with Airwallex becoming a unicorn several times over—most recently, in October 2022, raising US$100 million in a Series E extended round and sustaining its US$5.5 billion valuation.

Born in China, Zhang moved to Melbourne as a teenager. He began his career as a software engineer for various financial services companies in the UK and Australia while launching numerous different entrepreneurial ventures on the side, the most significant among them being Melbourne property development company Hohen, before establishing Airwallex in 2015.