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Airwallex co-founder Lucy Liu will on Thursday unveil a program offering young Australian artificial intelligence founders $100,000 in equity-free capital, as the global payments giant moves to deepen its local roots while navigating a financial crimes investigation and a stalled run at a public listing.
The initiative, called Latitude 37 and named after Melbourne’s latitude, will back at least 10 founders aged 25 and under each year with cash grants, mentorship and immersion trips to Singapore and San Francisco. Liu will announce the program at the Sunrise tech conference at Carriageworks in Sydney, with applications opening in late May.
The launch comes as more than $1 billion a day flows through Airwallex’s network. The company, valued at $US8 billion ($12 billion) after a late-stage funding round in December and dual-headquartered in Singapore and San Francisco, posted $US61 billion in payments volume in the final quarter of 2025, more than doubling its volume from a year earlier. Its largest backers include Australian venture firms Square Peg Capital, Blackbird Ventures and AirTree Ventures, alongside Chinese internet giant Tencent.
Airwallex was started in 2015 by chief executive Jack Zhang, Liu and three university friends, after Zhang grew frustrated with the cost of paying overseas suppliers for a Melbourne coffee shop, Tukk & Co, he ran with co-founder Max Li. The fintech has since built a global payments platform that sidesteps the legacy SWIFT system, and counts Qantas, Canva and Culture Amp among more than 250,000 business customers.
Liu, who leads the company’s social impact program, said the focus on under-25s reflected a gap in the local ecosystem.
“The real category-defining ideas usually come from founders who are closer to the beginning of their journey,” Liu said. “It’s not about excluding experienced founders, it’s more about addressing a gap, as there are a lot less pathways for young founders to access support.”
Liu said nearly 40 per cent of Australian early-stage capital was now coming from overseas investors, a trend she described as a balance issue rather than a categorical problem.
“If most early-stage capital comes from overseas, there’s a risk that decision-making, networks and long-term value creation shift offshore,” she said. “We should be trying to keep as much here if we can.”
The launch lands at a fraught moment for one of Australia’s most valuable private tech companies. In January, financial crimes regulator AUSTRAC ordered an external audit of Airwallex’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing program – at the company’s own expense – after concerns its platform was being used by so-called money mules, accounts of people knowingly or unknowingly co-opted to move illicit profits.
AUSTRAC said it had “reasonable grounds to suspect” Airwallex had contravened multiple sections of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act. The watchdog’s deputy chief executive Katie Miller said payment platforms had become an attractive vector for criminals because of their speed and frictionless onboarding.
“All of the things that make the service attractive to legitimate users are, unfortunately, the things that make it attractive to money-launderers and criminals,” Miller told this masthead at the time. “We do see this as a high-risk channel to move illicit funds in and out of Australia.”
The audit is progressing in line with the regulator’s timeframes, AUSTRAC has indicated, with the auditor’s report due to inform what, if any, further action it takes. The report will not be made public.
In the months since, Airwallex has hired global PR firm Sefiani, sought to recruit influencers on platforms including Partnar to amplify Zhang’s “thought leadership”, and engaged law firm Mark O’Brien Legal to demand the Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review take down five articles based on leaked internal documents. The articles remain online.
Asked for an update on the audit, Liu declined to comment in detail.
“The AUSTRAC audit is ongoing, so I can’t really comment, other than to say that we have co-operated fully with the auditor and regulator,” she said.
The investigation has clouded the company’s path to a public market debut. Zhang told CNBC in 2024 that Airwallex would be “IPO-ready” within two years, but walked back that framing on LinkedIn after the AUSTRAC order, writing the company “never planned to do an IPO this year, or even next year”.
Liu echoed that position.
“There isn’t a fixed IPO timeline. The focus is on being IPO ready rather than committing to a specific date,” she said.
In early April, Airwallex appointed Reserve Bank of Australia director Elana Rubin as chair of a new local oversight board, alongside former New Zealand prime minister Sir Bill English. Liu insisted the appointments were not a direct response to AUSTRAC.
“Appointing someone of Elana’s calibre is really a signal of our business maturing,” she said. “It’s not really about AUSTRAC. It’s about improving our governance as we scale.”
Airwallex is officially domiciled in the Cayman Islands and relocated its global headquarters to Singapore in 2023, before designating San Francisco as a second global headquarters in December.
Asked what she would tell a young founder weighing up whether to build in Australia, given Airwallex’s offshore structure, Liu pushed back at the framing.
“We didn’t ‘leave’ Australia. We’re still deeply rooted there with a large team and ongoing investment,” she said. “My honest advice to a young founder is to build where you have the best talent, network and early momentum, and for many people that can absolutely be Australia.”
Latitude 37 builds on more than $5 million Airwallex has committed to the University of Melbourne. Tech Council of Australia interim chief executive Lucinda Longcroft said the program would “accelerate emerging talent and strengthen the pipeline of globally competitive companies”.
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