Airwallex raises $320 million at an $11 billion valuation to build financial infrastructure for autonomous AI agents

I could do some bland fundraising congrats tweet for Airwallex and Jack Zhang today with their raising $320M at an $11BN valuation.

But I am not going to.

The reason I love doing 20VC is because I learn from the smartest minds in the world and they often become friends.

@awxjack is a big brother to me, a dear friend, a permanent fixture at every birthday party of mine and a firm favourite of my mother.

Jack, I am so proud of you and the team today. This is just the start. LFG. ❤️

@HarryStebbings This means the world mate

@HarryStebbings 🥹

@HarryStebbings You are a legend. @awxjack is a legend. Seems fitting 🙌🏼 LFG AIRWALLEX 🚀🚀🚀

@kimmonismus Does anyone use AI to shop and buy things?

I'm pretty AI pilled but I never bought anything with AI....

@kimmonismus so happy for Jack Zhang there

@kimmonismus Also Coinbase

@kimmonismus Right instinct, one layer too shallow. The rails already exist — cross-border payment APIs are years old.

The unsolved part is letting an agent spend irreversibly and knowing who’s liable when it’s wrong. The moat is permission, not payment.

@kimmonismus the boring part is the whole product.

moving money means: who is authorized, a per-action spend cap, an idempotency key so you never pay twice, and a receipt binding caller identity to each ledger row.

compliance is just an audit trail you can replay.

@kimmonismus And that's just a thing she'll be no one is teaching AI how to move money around... See if we had fingers like you and charge these places oh my God money would be moving like crazy right now! In fact I think the amount of money movement that would be happening if you were in cha

@kimmonismus Compliance for AI bots is just a headache waiting to happen. Nothing special.

@kimmonismus Exactly. Intelligence may drive the decisions, but trusted financial infrastructure is what allows agents to execute those decisions in the real world.

@kimmonismus I’m not letting AI control my finances until it can clean my room, cook, and wash my clothes reliably.

exactly. the shopping part is easy. the money movement + compliance part is where it breaks.

best approach i’ve seen: let the agent propose the transaction, but every actual payment has to be confirmed on a physical ledger signer. agent never touches the keys.

curious what you think about hardware in the loop for this

@kimmonismus compliance requires proof of why each payment was approved not just speed of execution @SentientAGI handles that piece providing intelligence infrastructure for traceable financial operations

@kimmonismus Regulators, banks, fx rails don't update on llm timescales. that's not a gap, that's a moat

Airwallex funding flow in 2H25 already showed a 40% uptick in cross-border tx volume vs 1H (EOD, not anon). If Airi surfaces a real API-first wallet layer on that existing OMS/multi-entity stack, they’ll own the compliance moat that no agent dev framework has bothered with.