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Chuang Han shared thisWhat an inspiring display of grit from our CEO Jack Zhang. Resilience is the core operating principle that led to this outcome. The choice to reject a life-changing offer and push through the COVID crash (when revenue dropped 40% overnight) speaks volumes about the CEO's conviction. That conviction is now reflected in the results: $1B ARR and a global platform that processed $235B last year. But we’re not just chasing payments volume. Evolving from core financial infrastructure to Autonomous Finance with AI agents is the future. The scale and technical complexity ahead are immense and exciting.Chuang Han shared thisStripe offered to acquire us for $1.2 billion when we had $2M in revenue. Today, we've raised $330M at an $8B valuation and reached $1B ARR. I'm going to share a story today I've never told anyone before... ⸻ At 16, I lost all financial support. I moved to Australia at 15. A year later, my family lost everything. My tuition was $24,000 a year, and I had to pay it myself. So I took every job possible: • 12-hour days in a lemon factory at 40°C • Bartending from 4pm–midnight • Overnight shifts at a petrol station All while studying computer science. But I never stopped coding. ⸻ The idea for Airwallex began in a coffee shop. Running a small business, I realized how painful it was to pay suppliers overseas. Why does money take days or weeks to move, when data moves in seconds? That question changed my life. Around that time, Lucy who I met in our coffee shop offered $1M for 20% of a company I hadn’t even registered yet. She was 24 and had never invested in anything before. ⸻ The early days were survival. 2016: We signed a term sheet... then a VC called a week later to pull out. We almost ran out of money. 2017: Mastercard and Tencent promised huge volume. We built for them. They delivered <1% of volume that was promised. 2018: Stripe offered $1.2B. With $2M in revenue, that was a 600x multiple. Personally, I would have made over $2B. But we said no. Patrick Collison told me: “I’m building Stripe for the next 20, 30, 40 years.” It resonated. We wanted to build something enduring for a long time as well. 90% of the company voted to keep going. 2020: We almost died again. COVID hit while closing our Series D. Markets crashed 30% in a week. Revenue dropped 40% overnight. ⸻ Then everything changed. From 2021 to 2025, we took off. • Revenue grew from $100M → $1B ARR in 4 years • North America & Europe became growth engines with 250%+ revenue CAGR • We processed $235B in payments a year • We raised $330M at an $8B valuation We evolved from pure infrastructure → software → AI agents. ⸻ For 10 years, I said nothing publicly. In Australia, you keep your head down and let the work speak for itself. But staying invisible has a cost: • Harder to recruit top talent • Customers don’t know your story • Competitors with half our scale get 10x attention So we changed that - partnering with McLaren F1 and Arsenal to tell the world who we are. ⸻ Airwallex is not just cross border payments company anymore. We’re building the financial operating system for global business: Infrastructure → Software → AI Agents → Autonomous Finance. The next decade is about creating a global, intelligent platform that powers how every business operates and grows. We’re just getting started.
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Chuang Han reposted thisChuang Han reposted thisIt took us over 6 years to reach $100M ARR, 9 years to reach 500M ARR, and only one more year to double it to 1B ARR at Airwallex. So, even though today is a big milestone, what I’m really excited about is getting to that next billion. Here’s how: Increased geo and product diversity Our growth is increasingly global. The Americas and EMEA now make up 35% of revenue, up from virtually zero just three years ago. This global reach is now a key engine for our business. We’re deepening our go-to-market presence across Europe, North America, and other key Asian regions, while moving further upmarket to serve larger, more complex customers. And when it comes to product diversity, roughly half of our customers now use multiple Airwallex products. AI acceleration A decade of building proprietary financial infrastructure now allows us to build meaningful value with AI. Fintechs that have invested in real infrastructure—licenses, payment networks, compliance, and data at scale—are best positioned to win the AI race in the CFO’s office. That is our edge. Brand equity investment The past decade was about building our products, our infrastructure, and the proof that Airwallex could scale globally. The next decade is about building brand equity — earning the trust of businesses and entrepreneurs everywhere. Because in the long run, brand creates the deepest kind of compound value. I’ve never felt more confident in our trajectory or our ability to reach the next stage of growth. A big thank you to our teams, customers, and partners for getting us here and taking us to the next level. Thanks to Leo Schwartz at Fortune for the opportunity to reflect on the milestone and what comes next. Links below to our announcement and the Fortune story: https://lnkd.in/gAGYprHS Airwallex announcement: https://lnkd.in/g9Nvd7-b My post on X: https://lnkd.in/g25DbeEg
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Chuang Han shared thisI am hiring an Engineering Lead for our Growth team at Airwallex. In this role, you will drive the development and implementation of new initiatives that drive user adoption and revenue growth. You will work closely with ex-Facebook and ex-Uber teammates to develop innovative solutions from 0 to 1. Ping me if you are interested. We are also hiring for engineers, product managers and designers. I am happy to do a referral and explain further what we are building at Airwallex. #hiring #engineeringlead #growthteam
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Chuang Han shared thisChuang Han shared thisWelcome to easier, faster and accurate reconciliation of business expenses. Excited to launch NetSuite bank feed integration. Great work by Richard Yu, Natalie Tse, Gina Daryanani https://lnkd.in/gjcZcprF
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Chuang Han liked thisChuang Han liked thisGlobal payments is being rebuilt. Some are routing around the system. Some are layering on top of it. We chose to rebuild it. At Airwallex, we’ve spent the last decade taking the path of maximum resistance — owning licenses, building direct regulatory relationships, and creating a global financial infrastructure from the ground up. It’s harder. Slower. More capital intensive. But it compounds. In a world shaped by AI, stablecoins, and agentic commerce, the winners won’t be those with the best interface — but those who own the rails.The Path of Max Resistance: The Spectrum of Global Payments InfrastructureThe Path of Max Resistance: The Spectrum of Global Payments Infrastructure
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Chuang Han liked thisChuang Han liked thisAirwallex is scaling our San Francisco office — and we’re looking for top recruiting talent to make it happen. We’re hiring: 🔹 Talent Acquisition Partner, Technology 🔹 Senior Manager, Talent Acquisition, Technology ✨ This is a unique opportunity to: 🔹 Be one of the founding members of our technical recruitment team in SF 🔹 Build a top-tier tech team from the ground up 🔹 Partner with world-class engineering leaders Apply here: https://lnkd.in/giFSQn_d
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Chuang Han liked thisChuang Han liked thisIf you've ever wondered what unmistakable product-market fit looks like, check out this graph from our latest piece on Airwallex. In 2018, the $5.6B fintech went from processing $5 million in volume to multiple **billions**. It has continued to grow rapidly since, recently hitting an $80 billion annual run rate. 🏑 🏑 🏑 You can read the full chronicle of Airwallex here -- a wild story: https://lnkd.in/eGuDYNBp
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Chuang Han liked thisChuang Han liked thisWe’re excited to share a recent case study featuring: Airwallex After onboarding with us, here are their results: - Reduced time to build from months to weeks - Launched into emerging marketplaces within weeks Here’s what their team had to say: “With Rutter, it takes us 1-2 weeks to build the auth flow into our web application... Having these new integrations allows us to open the floodgates to new customers.” Want to learn more? Check out the full case study here. https://lnkd.in/eXMy7-ey
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Chuang Han liked thisChuang Han liked thisAirwallex intends to hire 500 new workers in 2023, with 100 of the positions in Australia. “We’ve got big ambitions for 2023." We're hiring for our Product Teams in both Sydney and Melbourne. Check out our Careers page or drop me a message to find out more :) #AirwallexAirwallex aims to hire 500 workers as tech giants cut jobs hardAirwallex aims to hire 500 workers as tech giants cut jobs hard
Experience & Education
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Airwallex
View Chuang’s full experience
See their title, tenure and more.
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Courses
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Cloud Computing
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Data Structures and Algorithms
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Database Applications
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Distributed Systems
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Information Systems Modeling
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Introduction to Computer Systems
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Machine Learning
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Search Engines and Web Mining
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Service Oriented Architecture
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Web Application Development
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Web Application Security Performance
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Projects
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Netflix Movie Recommender System
1. Developed a movie recommender system based on Netflix Prize dataset.
2. Used collaborative filtering algorithms and customized bias elimination algorithms to increase prediction accuracy. -
Text Search Engine
1. Built a Lucene and Indri inspired text search engine based on a corpus with 890,630 documents. Implemented three popular retrieval algorithms (boolean retrieval, Okapi BM25 and statistical language models).
2. Used query reformulation, multiple representations, machine-learned ranking and document categorizing to increase retrieval recall and precision. -
Shop & Share
1. Built a social-networking-based eCommerce website (as the combination of Facebook and eBay) using Java Servlets and Java Server Pages (JSPs).
2. Stored user contents in MySQL databases and used JQuery to create interesting human interactions.
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Dynamic Storage Allocator
1. Wrote a dynamic storage allocator, which implemented dynamic memory-management functions, including malloc, free, realloc and calloc, by utilizing memlib.c package in C.
2. Implemented segregated free lists and first-fit algorithm to organize and scan free blocks. Many tricky and sophisticated methods were used to optimize allocator’s space utilization and throughput.
3. Ranked 6th (of 304) in the most challenging project in a famous CS course at CMU. -
Web Proxy
1. Implemented a web proxy, which could handle multiple requests in parallel and cache recent web objects, in C programming language.
2. Accumulated experience with multithreading, locking, caching and concurrent programming. -
Strategies and Algorithms for Robot Soccer Game
1. Designed high-performance real-time algorithms for boxy robots to predict ball's behavior, plan movement path and to perform role-oriented actions, including dribbling, shooting and guarding.
2. Developed intelligent game strategy and the quick role-switching mechanism in transformation between attack and defense. Won 2nd place among 24 teams.
Honors & Awards
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Information Networking Institute Scholarship
Carnegie Mellon University
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Outstanding Graduates of Northeastern University
Northeastern University
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Chris Lam
There are two types of vibe coding: "Full vibe coding" and "Semi-vibe coding". Recently had a thought-provoking conversation with Jenny Wong about #VibeCoding. Many engineers are against it, but as a serial CTO from Series A/B startups and someone who has run my own startups, I am NOT against vibe coding at all. 1️⃣ Full vibe coding, with tools like Lovable/Replit/Bolt, is a game-changer for non-technical founders aiming to build MVPs quickly and validate ideas. While critics highlight issues like AI-generated bugs, security holes, and the risk of sky-high cloud bills, these are manageable risks for small-scale, early deployment. The key is to recognize that vibe-coded prototypes aren't meant to scale; when validation is achieved, expect "big bang" refactoring or complete revamp. 2️⃣ Semi-vibe coding, which is already mainstream for experienced teams like ours at Aizzie: we've been leveraging GitHub Copilot since 2021, then Cursor last year, and now Claude Code and Kiro. Here, AI assists us in code generation, but everything remains under expert supervision. This hybrid model enhances productivity while keeping true engineering discipline intact. Embracing both forms of vibe coding can accelerate time-to-market and empower both engineers and non-technical founders, as long as we remain mindful of the trade-offs and transition at the right time.
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Kartik Arora
SEA companies still living 2021? (not judging with a few conversations) Spoke to a CTO recently (Singapore market) and he mentioned that AI is not in their agenda. They see it as just another feature upgrade on the product (Yikes!). They are looking to hire manager to only focus on managing the team, and not be involved in coding (world is changing faster, probably haven't used cursor so far). At this pace, I won’t be surprised if they’re left behind very quickly, especially when many companies are already scrambling to catch up in the AI race. Then we have US and China going all out on AI. History speaks for itself. 🥲 #SEATech #AI #Leadership
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Yee Meng Chua
PMs, Engineers, and English as Code? ----- In the era of AI, is English and programming code really that different? Karl Chan, founder of Sourcy, and I hit upon this question last night about the future of how PMs will work with engineers. . 1. Obvious Differences ----- > English as we understand can be non-deterministic – two people hearing the same “vague” thing can have different interpretations. > We think of code differently however. When we think of code, we think of the same inputs as always producing the same outputs. > (This isn’t always technically true, but more on that later). . . 2. Specs as Code ----- > But what if highly precise words in English were used to convey a process in a spec – with agentic coding agents then executing code writes based on that spec? > To the extent that you can expect/assume highly compliant code changes, is this then not a “programming language” of sorts? . . 3. Deterministic LLMs? ----- > This is especially in light of Thinking Machine’s recently published paper titled “Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference”. > Thinking Machine achieved 100% of the same results running a prompt 1000 times using experimental inference-stage architectural changes. > For the layperson, this means we may actually be quite close to exact LLM outputs for a given input, just like a program! > (FYI: Thinking Machines is an AI startup founded by Mira Murati, the former CTO of OpenAI) . . 4. Rethinking Programming ----- > If today, we accept that LLMs do a lot of a program’s heavy lifting, and > That traditional coding is just the scaffolding to control and guide this power > Then the expected value of programming cannot be said to be simply a deterministic output > And following that logic, if we can get such expected value from writing (and collaborating on) specs and have coding agents do the tedious “coding”, then > Is English – in the precise form used in writing specs – not therefore a programming language? . . 5. Spec-English as a Language ----- > After all, traditional programming languages have a wide range of abstractions themselves to begin with. > We have low level programming languages like C all the way to high level programming languages like Python. > Perhaps we should see Spec-English (I wonder if this can become a trending term) as the next highest level programming language. . . 6. The Future of PM + Engineering ------ > We really might be in an era where PMs and engineers focus all their time on debating and refining specs, with the (eventual) full confidence and trust that coding agents will be able to execute that spec flawlessly. > Imagine how fast products can get developed and iterated on. User gave feedback? Boom – changes/features were incorporated into production within a day. > What a world this would be!
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