FinTech news in Salesforce Ventures category

Unlike other funds aimed at expanding a product’s ecosystem like the Alexa Fund at Amazon or the Slack Fund, Capital 49 is not operated off Airwallex’s balance sheet, instead tapping a number of Airwallex’s investors as LPs but using Airwallex’s knowledge of the market to guide it. Airwallex, as we’ve written before, made a splash when it was first founded by doing the right thing at the right time: it did the tough work of integrating with lots of banks and building complex financial services and then made them easy to use (leaning on APIs) so that companies doing business across country boundaries could set up banking and money moving services quickly, initially out of Asia Pacific and eventually globally. Airwallex, the Hong Kong/Australia startup that provides cross-border banking and other financial services for businesses, has raised $100 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its business operationally, geographically and with new products in areas like credit and expense management — and for M&A. He and others on the team could see what was coming around the corner earlier in the year, he added, and although Airwallex still had significant money in the bank — $600 million out of the total $900 million raised as of the end of September, when Zhang and I spoke — the startup chose to raise more, just in case.