Airwallex president Lucy Liu on the company’s plans to be ‘IPO-ready’

Nicholas Gordon here.

When is Airwallex, the Australian-born payments company, planning to go public? The company, which serves over 675,000 businesses and claims to have over $1 billion in annualized run rate revenue, once talked about having a U.S.

IPO in 2026, but those plans have gotten fuzzier over time.

In a recent conversation for our new Asia Agenda series, president Lucy Liu told me that the firm still plans to be “IPO-ready” by the end of the year, but added that it’s “just not the best time, given how complicated things are.” One can’t blame her for thinking that way.

2026 already boasts two key IPOs—SpaceX’s $85.7 billion debut and SK Hynix’s $26.5 billion ADR sale—and potentially a third in Anthropic’s. (OpenAI is reportedly considering a debut in 2027.) And it’s not just the U.S.

Shanghai has already had one blockbuster IPO, in ChangXin Memory Technologies’ $9.8 billion listing.

And Alibaba just tapped Hong Kong’s equity markets for a $10 billion share sale.

A smaller company–even one as buzzy as Airwallex–might get lost in the shuffle as bigger investors hold on to their cash.

Other startups have delayed their IPO plans.

Travel platform Klook filed for a New York IPO last November.

The company originally scheduled it for the end of 2025, then delayed it until early 2026, and has remained studiously quiet since then. (Klook’s founder Ethan Lin declined to comment on the company’s IPO plans when my colleague Angelica Ang spoke to him earlier this year.) But it’s also not clear that companies like Airwallex need to go public right now.

The company raised $330 million in December, and then raised another $320 million in June.

“We just want to be able to have enough capital to fast-charge our plans,” Liu told me, as the company barrels into agentic commerce and automated bookkeeping.

“Investors are going more towards later-stage investments,” Liu added.