The $16b Aussie tech firm in a slanging match over its China links

Jack Zhang, the co-founder and chief executive of Australian-born payments company Airwallex, once claimed to have worked 100 hours a week for the past 20 years. These days, some of that time appears to be dedicated to playing keyboard warrior, with Zhang embroiled in increasingly intemperate online sparring over the company’s links to China.

The source of Zhang’s online animus is Keith Rabois, the Trump-aligned Silicon Valley venture capitalist who has repeatedly accused Airwallex of being vulnerable to legal obligations to assist with Chinese Communist Party espionage upon request, on the basis that it could be compelled to hand American users’ data to Beijing.

This week, Zhang accused Rabois (who is on the board of rival payments start-up Ramp) of “unhinged conspiratorial rants” on X. Rabois rather ominously warned that Zhang would be “pleading the fifth soon”, in a reference to the constitutional provision that protects people from self-incrimination. The Airwallex boss then responded with a Mad Men meme.

So far, so silly. But Rabois’ claims clearly continue to get under Airwallex’s skin.

Airwallex, which was founded 11 years ago in a Melbourne cafe, but is now domiciled in the Cayman Islands, has been a runaway Australian fintech success story, most recently soaring to a $16 billion valuation and becoming the country’s second-most valuable start-up after Canva. But it has never quite been able to run away from a series of damaging headlines.

Local outlets, including this masthead, have reported on a relentless, aggressive workplace culture at the company. Airwallex has attempted to shrug this off as the teething problems associated with a high-growth start-up, and the disconnect between its founders, a bunch of ambitious type A strivers like Zhang (who insists that burnout is not in his vocabulary), and less motivated staff.

In January, weeks after Rabois made his claims about Chinese espionage, the financial crimes regulator AUSTRAC ordered an external audit of Airwallex’s anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism-financing program , at the company’s expense, putting plans for a 2026 NASDAQ listing on ice. The probe is ongoing, and there has been no mention of China by AUSTRAC.

In the US, Rabois’ concerns about China have also made it all the way to Capitol Hill, where a Republican-controlled congressional committee warned Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that the company’s links to China could compromise sensitive American data. In June, Republican senator Tom Cotton said that while Airwallex “markets itself as an Australian company, its ties to communist China run deep”.

Zhang responded by framing these criticisms as blinded by bias against his own country of origin.

“I was born in China. I cannot change that fact, nor would I seek to,” he wrote in a recent letter to the congressional committee. “I am a proud Australian citizen. I arrived in Melbourne as an immigrant at 15 with little English and no safety net, and Australia gave me the education, the opportunity and the freedom to build something.”

Through all this, however, the company has at times come across as impossibly thin-skinned.