Airwallex president Lucy Liu describes one of the company’s newest products with a car metaphor. “It’s like assisted driving, like you have in a Tesla,” she says of T:0, an automated bookkeeping system designed to run a company’s finance function on its own. “You still have someone in the driver’s seat, but the car really drives itself.”

T:0 is part of a broader shift for Airwallex, which began in Australia and has grown into a major global fintech and payments company. Like Wise and Revolut, Airwallex first expanded by serving industries that depend on cross-border payments, including e-commerce, gaming, and online travel. But as AI reshapes how companies manage subscriptions, payments, and other operations, fintech companies such as Airwallex are evolving as well, trying to turn payments infrastructure into a broader operating system for businesses that sell and spend across borders.

In late June, Airwallex raised $320 million in a Series H funding round led by Addition, a returning investor, with participation from Baillie Gifford, T. Rowe Price, Amex Ventures, and Washington University in St. Louis. The round valued Airwallex at $11 billion, up from the $8 billion valuation the startup received in December, when it raised $330 million in another Addition-led round.

At the time of the June financing, CEO Jack Zhang said the capital would help the company “move faster into Airwallex’s next chapter: autonomous finance, agentic commerce, and the infrastructure to power both.”

“Our fundraising has been quite rapid over the past two years,” Liu tells Fortune, adding that the latest round followed “ongoing conversations” with existing investors such as Addition. “We have a lot ahead of us, and we just want to be able to have enough capital to fast-charge our plans.”

Chasing customers across borders

Airwallex was founded in Melbourne, Australia, more than a decade ago to help businesses move money across borders. Founders Jack Zhang and Max Li have said the idea came from the difficulty of running a coffee shop that imported goods from overseas.

The company now serves more than 675,000 businesses and reports more than $1 billion in annualized run-rate revenue. Liu declined to disclose specific profitability figures, but said the company was “EBITDA positive” and had a “healthy gross margin.”

As Airwallex pushes further into AI, it is highlighting two new products: T:0, the automated bookkeeping system, and Ari, an agentic consumer wallet built for one-click checkout. The products reflect a broader trend in fintech, where firms are layering software and automation on top of payments rails to handle more of the back-office work that used to require human oversight.

The company is also expanding aggressively into new markets, including the U.S., South Korea, Mexico, and Brazil. Liu acknowledges that the company appears to be “expanding everywhere.” In some markets, expansion has come through acquisitions, including the purchase of MexPago, which gave Airwallex a Mexican payments license. In other places, the company has followed customer demand. Expansion into Brazil on behalf of one client, Liu says, often brings in customers seeking to operate in the opposite direction, toward Asia.

“Local businesses are all looking away to expand globally, and easier ways to operate globally,” she says.

Airwallex is also making a push into the U.S. “If you’re a U.S. company that wants to sell in Australia, wants to sell in Singapore, wants to sell in the U.K., wants to sell in Canada, wants to do that efficiently, and wants to have banking, payments, spend, and treasury management all in a single platform, that’s where Airwallex comes in,” Zhang told Fortune in November.

A rebound?

Airwallex’s fast pace of fundraising comes amid a broader recovery in Asian venture capital after several sluggish years. According to KPMG, VC-backed companies across Asia raised $50.8 billion in the second quarter, the strongest performance since the fourth quarter of 2021.

China accounted for $35.1 billion of that total, and much of the market’s attention remains focused on AI and hardware. The four largest deals in Asia went to Chinese AI developers: DeepSeek, ByteDance, StepFun, and Moonshot AI.

Even with that rebound, VC funding in Asia remains well below U.S. levels. Startups in the U.S. raised $145 billion in the same quarter.

More companies are also raising late-stage capital, including Airwallex’s Series H, once a relatively rare structure. Others are staying private longer. Data processing company Databricks, for example, is assembling investors for an unprecedented Series M round that would value the company at $188 billion.

“Investors are going more towards later stage investments,” Liu says. “It’s not that they don’t have capital. They just want to see success, right? They want to see a track record before they deploy capital into that particular company.”

She adds that larger companies are increasingly able to raise money without going public, which helps explain why some firms can keep expanding while delaying a listing. That includes Dublin-based Stripe, the payments giant founded in 2010 that has not yet held an IPO.

“Larger companies are still able to raise money without going public,” Liu noted. “Most people are still a little bit on the fence about going public.”

After several major U.S. IPOs — including SpaceX’s $85.7 billion debut and SK Hynix’s $26.5 billion ADR sale — and expected offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic, other listings may struggle to draw the same level of institutional attention.

Liu says Airwallex still plans to be “IPO-ready” by the end of this year, although a final date will depend on market conditions. “It’s just not the best time, given how complicated things are,” she says. “I’m sure all the pre-approval companies will tell you this.”

Geopolitics and regulatory scrutiny

Airwallex has also faced scrutiny over its ownership structure and data practices. In June, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent alleging deep ties between Airwallex and Beijing. “While Airwallex markets itself as an Australian company, its ties to Communist China run deep,” he wrote, pointing to a reported 20% stake held by Tencent and HongShan, formerly Sequoia China, and citing China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, which compels companies to assist Chinese intelligence services.

Cotton asked for an investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and suggested that Airwallex’s Chinese investors may need to divest.

The letter followed remarks from venture capitalist Keith Rabois, managing director of Khosla Ventures and a board director of competing fintech company Ramp, who described Airwallex as a “Chinese backdoor into sensitive American data.”

Liu declined to comment directly on the letter, instead referring to a prior company statement. She said the broader regulatory environment could create opportunities rather than obstacles. “There’s a new category being created for global businesses like ours, which is good, because you can imagine trying to fit us into a box where we don’t really belong,” she says.

Zhang has called the allegations “false” and said U.S. customer data is stored domestically and cannot be accessed by staff in China. He also said Tencent holds a passive stake of less than 10% and does not have a board seat. Airwallex has said it has invited third-party firms to audit its privacy and data controls.

The Financial Times reported in May that Airwallex had also begun moving some China-based staff who did not work with Chinese customers out of the country, with a spokesperson telling the newspaper the changes were driven by data security concerns.

The U.S. is not the only regulator paying attention. In January, Australia’s financial intelligence agency AUSTRAC ordered Airwallex to bring in an external auditor to confirm the company was meeting anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism financing obligations. The agency said it took the step after suspecting “serious noncompliance.”

Liu says Airwallex is “cooperating fully” and says the review is industry-wide rather than specific to the company. “I think we’re just a little bit more noticeable because of our growth,” she says.

Overconfidence

Liu, 35, was born in northern China and later moved to Auckland, New Zealand. After college in Melbourne, Australia, she relocated to Hong Kong, where she worked for Barclays and then China International Capital Corporation, a state-owned investment bank.

Her involvement with Airwallex began in 2015, when Max Li, a friend from college, introduced her to Zhang in Melbourne. Zhang was seeking $500,000 to fund the startup, and Liu, then on a “career break” from finance, invested $1 million in seed capital.

“I was 25, and I had a bit of an overconfidence situation,” Liu says, laughing. “I remember traveling so much in 2017 and 2018. I would be on a plane almost every other day.”

Liu is listed on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Asia ranking, which recognizes female executives across the Asia-Pacific region. Still, she says she is uneasy about being singled out for her gender.

“I actually have very strong feelings about being labeled,” she says. “People can often say: ‘It’s very hard for women to raise money–except for you.’ I don’t want people to feel like they’re exceptions.”

Australia’s small pond

Australia has become an unexpected source of technology companies in recent years. Airwallex is now part of a group that includes Canva, the design platform valued at $42 billion, and Atlassian, the software company behind Jira, Confluence, and Trello.

That marks a shift from a decade ago, when Australian founders were more focused on domestic problems. Liu recalls that Airwallex was unable to raise money in Australia during its seed stage because the country’s angel investor base was so small. Today, Australian venture funds are much larger and are approaching the scale of U.S. or Asian funds.

Australia’s strong human capital, relatively abundant natural resources, and close ties with Washington are also attracting more U.S. tech companies.

Even so, the country’s remoteness and smaller market can make it difficult to launch a global business. Last year, Airwallex named Singapore and San Francisco as its global co-headquarters, moving away from its earlier base in Australia.

Liu says the headquarters shift matters less for a global company with talent and leadership spread across multiple regions. Still, she says, “Australia is quite small.”

“If you’re really trying to grow a team, then the pipeline of talent and the market itself will restrict you a little bit. Businesses have to think outside of Australia to expand, grow and scale.”

“AI and tech companies are possible in Australia,” she concludes. “They just need a bit more help, funding, and mentorship to really be able to grow globally.”

In Fortune’s “Asia Agenda” column, published at least twice a month, the magazine speaks with top business leaders across Asia about how they are building for the future and what they have learned from leading companies in one of the world’s fastest-growing and most dynamic regions. This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.