Airwallex startup finalises Series A round

Square Peg Capital, Tencent, Sequoia Capital China, Gobi Partners, and Mastercard participated as investors in the round, raised in stages over 2017.

The Melbourne-based business doesn’t exclusively focus on travel, but many of its early customers are travel agencies and online marketplaces providing travel, especially in Asia Pacific.

The company previously led revamp of payments solutions at Air New Zealand. Launched in the 2017 summer, the cross-border payments platform uses machine learning to analyze each transaction that comes through to choose the optimal route for delivering payments from several options, depending on factors like speed and cost.

For example, someone running a tour guide marketplace for Southeast Asia may have a local guide who wants to be paid in Indonesian rupiah and a traveler who wants to pay for the tour with a debit card at an Australian bank. Today’s cross-border tech solutions often take hours or sometimes days to complete a transaction like that. Airwallex claims to speed up the process while trimming interbank fees.