Airwallex Closes $19 Million Round for Payments Tech: Travel Startup Funding This Week
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This week, startups raised funding to help simplify cross-border transactions, lend consumers money to book travel, offer airport valet services, map interior spaces, automate back-office processes for rental property managers, and split the booking of multiple-night hotel stays. They'll have a happy New Year for sure.
Each week we round up travel startups that have recently received or announced funding. The total publicized this week was more than $41 million.
>>Airwallex, a financial technology startup that enables companies to make cross-border payments efficiently, said it had it had closed its Series A round at $19 million.
Square Peg Capital, Tencent, Sequoia Capital China, Gobi Partners, and MasterCard participated as investors in the round, raised in stages over the past year.
The Melbourne-based business doesn't exclusively focus on travel, but many of its early customers are travel agencies and online marketplaces providing travel, especially in Asia Pacific.
Co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang previously led revamp of payments solutions at Air New Zealand.
Launched this summer, the cross-border payments platform uses machine learning to analyze each transaction that comes through to choose the optimal route for delivering payments from several options, depending on factors like speed and cost.
For example, someone running a tour guide marketplace for Southeast Asia may have a local guide who wants to be paid in Indonesian rupiah and a traveler who wants to pay for the tour with a debit card at an Australian bank. Today's cross-border tech solutions often take hours or sometimes days to complete a transaction like that. AirWallex claims to sp
