From angel to unicorn: Airwallex’s Lucy Liu’s US$1 million bet that built a US$6.2 billion fintech company

One of the most surprising speedbumps in Airwallex’s journey is how their first product had the wrong product-market fit, but that laid the groundwork for everything that followed. The team initially built an invoicing product where suppliers could send payment requests through the Airwallex platform. The concept was sound: click a link, pay instantly, money moves globally.

But recipients would receive these payment requests and immediately become suspicious. “The problem was that you didn’t know what Airwallex was,” Liu explains. “So when you get the email, you actually have to check with the person who issued the invoice if it was legit. To recipients, it may come across as a phishing email.”

The product’s low uptake rate taught them a crucial lesson about trust and brand recognition in financial services. Rather than abandoning their mission, they pivoted completely, focusing instead on empowering businesses to make payments rather than receive them. This shift became the foundation of their payout API (application programming interface) and multi-currency infrastructure.

“We basically threw all that away,” Liu recalls. “But thankfully, we were building our infrastructure on the back end, so we changed that to ‘you use Airwallex to pay me.’” The pivot made perfect sense—as long as the recipient trusted the sender, the payment method became irrelevant.

Read more: Asia’s digital banks are disrupting what it means to democratise wealth

The decision to focus on infrastructure first proved prescient. By 2019, when they built payment acceptance and card issuance in the same year, their multi-currency foundation allowed both products to launch with immediate traction. “We spent a lot of the money that we raised that year on these two products,” Liu notes. “But because we had the multi-currency infrastructure as a foundation, these two products were able to launch two products quickly and gain rapid traction with our customers, simply because the need was clear.”

The company’s approach now centres on what Liu calls “the future of global banking”—starting with a proprietary network that enables businesses to hold, convert, and move money without the traditional correspondent banking delays. This network gives Airwallex’s customers the unique ability to instantly generate local account numbers and accept payments in over 60 countries, trade 90+ currencies at interbank rates, and pay out to more than 200 countries, with local payment rails available in over 120 of them.

Read more: 20,000 users in 48 hours: YouTrip CEO Caecilia Chu on nailing product-market fit

In 2018, another fintech company offered to buy Airwallex for US$1.2 billion. For a company that was still relatively young, this represented validation and an enormous exit opportunity. The decision to reject the acquisition offer and continue building independently speaks to the audacious vision Liu and her co-founders had for redefining global financial infrastructure.

Rather than becoming part of another company’s ecosystem, they bet on their ability to build something even more significant. Airwallex has since scaled to serve over 150,000 customers with a team of 1,800 people globally across 26 offices, and has achieved a valuation more than five times that of the rejected offer.

Today, Liu maintains a pragmatic view of the company’s success metrics. “Unit economics fundamentally matter, but there are moments in the capital markets when these metrics are overlooked. Valuation therefore is not a goal in itself. It’s simply a number that reflects prevailing market sentiment.”

Instead, she focuses on the metrics that demonstrates whether the business is truly resilient and impactful: “This means having the DNA in our business to adapt to change, to ensure our unit economics are robust and resilient, and leveraging technology to relentlessly drive efficiency and real-world impact for our customers.”

 “For us, it’s also about how automated and scalable our operations are—these are the levers that create real, lasting value for customers, far beyond just the valuation number.”

The fintech unicorn continues to expand into new markets, with Liu noting they’re “still building and adding new countries and capabilities” to their platform. Over 90 per cent of their transactions now bypass traditional Swift networks, with approximately 95 per cent arriving the same day—a testament to the infrastructure-first approach that Liu helped champion from the very beginning.

Meet more Gen.T Leaders of Tomorrow from Finance & Venture Capital. 

NOW READ

Why Sarah Chen-Spellings is investing a billion dollars in female founders

Chibo Tang of Gobi Partners on AI, entrepreneurship, and the Greater Bay Area

Where’s the Money: Alibaba’s Cindy Chow on what Hong Kong VCs really want in a startup