A Stripe competitor aims to challenge the incumbent fintech in yet another vertical. Airwallex, the $8 billion payments startup founded in Australia, announced on Wednesday that it was rolling out a billing product that helps businesses generate invoices, track customer usage of software products, and manage subscriptions.
The new product suite is at no added cost for current customers and included in the company’s existing pricing plans, Shannon Scott, chief product officer of Airwallex, told Fortune. “If you have customers all around the world, it’s very easy to get paid by those customers,” he added.
Airwallex’s billing features add to the fintech’s existing suite of products, which include checkout, payments, and corporate cards. The firm’s new offering also puts it even more squarely in competition with Stripe, which has had its own billing business for almost 10 years.
“As we expand as a business, we’re obviously going to start to come up against a number of different players internationally,” said Scott.
Fintechs converge
Although Stripe has seen its valuation balloon from $91.5 billion announced in 2025 to $159 billion in February, its recent rise has come amid increasing competition. Those upstarts include the corporate card contender Ramp, which is raising funds at a $40 billion valuation, according to the Wall Street Journal. And they also comprise Airwallex, cofounded in Melbourne, Australia, by CEO Jack Zhang.
Airwallex initially focused on cross-border payments, but, like its competitors, the fintech has gradually increased its product offerings, growing into a one-stop shop for enterprise finance. The company’s payments vertical only accounts for 30% of its revenue, Zhang told Fortune in November.
Today, Airwallex and its competitors are increasingly coming to resemble each other. “I think both companies like Airwallex and Stripe originated from different places, but are sort of converging as these sort of fintech players start to grow and expand,” said Scott.
Scott said Airwallex’s edge is its international breadth. The company is now headquartered in both Singapore and San Francisco, and the fintech has only recently started to accelerate its push into North America and Europe, markets that Stripe and Ramp have historically dominated.
Still, Scott believes that it’s not a zero-sum game. “There’s still a huge amount of white space,” he said, “given that a lot of customers are served by more traditional players.”
