In this interview from the Bank of America Private Tech Trailblazers Conference 2026, Irvin Sha, head of corporate development, capital markets and investor relations at Airwallex, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how a decade of financial infrastructure building is now powering agentic commerce. Sha explains how Airwallex evolved from securing licenses and banking partnerships across dozens of countries into a global financial operating system that layers AI intelligence on top of transactions. He details how that infrastructure lets customers hand off tasks to AI agents, and why agentic commerce represents a fundamental platform shift in how trust, credentials and cross-border payments are handled.
Key themes include the interoperability challenge facing agentic commerce, as multiple providers race to build competing protocols for letting agents move money across borders safely. Sha breaks down how Airwallex's 90-plus global licenses and partnerships with banks like JPMorgan establish the trust layer required before agents can be handed sensitive financial credentials. He also shares a progress report on the company's capital markets momentum, including three funding rounds in rapid succession that pushed its valuation from $6 billion to $11 billion, alongside 60%-plus year-over-year growth and a $1.4 billion revenue run rate. From the fixed-cost architecture that drives incremental margin at scale to the emerging conversation around AI sovereignty and who controls enterprise financial data, Sha outlines why Airwallex sees itself as the trusted rails beneath the next era of autonomous commerce.
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Irvin Sha, Airwallex
In this interview from the Bank of America Private Tech Trailblazers Conference 2026, Irvin Sha, head of corporate development, capital markets and investor relations at Airwallex, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how a decade of financial infrastructure building is now powering agentic commerce. Sha explains how Airwallex evolved from securing licenses and banking partnerships across dozens of countries into a global financial operating system that layers AI intelligence on top of transactions. He details how that infrastructure lets customers hand off tasks to AI agents, and why agentic commerce represents a fundamental platform shift in how trust, credentials and cross-border payments are handled.
Key themes include the interoperability challenge facing agentic commerce, as multiple providers race to build competing protocols for letting agents move money across borders safely. Sha breaks down how Airwallex's 90-plus global licenses and partnerships with banks like JPMorgan establish the trust layer required before agents can be handed sensitive financial credentials. He also shares a progress report on the company's capital markets momentum, including three funding rounds in rapid succession that pushed its valuation from $6 billion to $11 billion, alongside 60%-plus year-over-year growth and a $1.4 billion revenue run rate. From the fixed-cost architecture that drives incremental margin at scale to the emerging conversation around AI sovereignty and who controls enterprise financial data, Sha outlines why Airwallex sees itself as the trusted rails beneath the next era of autonomous commerce.
>> John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, my hometown. Of course, this is where all the action is. We are at the B of A Private Tech Trailblazers event. It's essentially an investor conference. It really showcases the private companies that have escape velocity, have momentum, and obviously in the age of AI, they have secret sauce. Our next guest, Irvin Sha, he's the head of corporate development, capital markets, and investor relations at Airwallex, a fast-growing company. Billions in transactions, more than a unicorn. I think you're at an $11 billion valuation.
Irvin Sha
>> That is correct.
John Furrier
>> Congratulations. Welcome. Welcome to theCUBE. Appreciate it.
Irvin Sha
>> Thank you for having me.
John Furrier
>> So a little makeshift studio here at the Four Seasons. The conference is going on in the hallways. The buzz is all about, okay, who's hitting escape velocity? Who's going public? What's the financing M&A activity? You guys are in a sweet spot because you're doing financial software with agentic AI. Explain what you guys do and why you're successful.
Irvin Sha
>> Yeah, fantastic. Airwallex is a global financial banking operating system. So essentially what we do is that we enable businesses from small, mid-sized businesses all the way up to mid-market/enterprise to essentially go global with the same set of resources that a Fortune 500 company would be able to do. So in the past, you would need to go and get a team in any country that you go to, get a local bank account, a payment provider, all of these kinds of things. And then you'd have to do that country by country by country. If you use us, then you can essentially go and do all of that in any of the top 80 to 100 economies in the world. And increasingly now with the advent of AI, what we can do is that we can layer intelligence on top of all of these things. So not only is it you have a bank account and you've got transactions coming in, but we can actually parse for you all of the things that are happening. And so you can not only see and understand what's happening with your business, but you can actually ask your agent to take action on your behalf.
John Furrier
>> Talk about the company evolution. You guys were founded over a decade ago. So as the world evolves— AI was coming online probably a couple of years after you formed, when the research started hitting the scene. There's a lot of regulations. You
Irvin Sha
>> mentioned—Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> Outside the United States. Hassles, paperwork, process, old school antiquated systems. What was, what was the key breakthrough? And then talk about the AI moment where that kicked in for you guys.
Irvin Sha
>> Yeah, absolutely. So honestly, the company was founded in Melbourne in 2015, and the first, I'd say, 5 to 8 years of this company were really building from the ground up the financial infrastructure that would enable us to move money around the world in the same way that, a multinational company would really want to do as well. And so that involved getting licenses for all of the different types of activities that you need to do. In some cases, you need a different license for accepting payments versus a license that you would use to hold money. and so getting licenses for all of those different activities in every single corner of the world. On top of that, you need to go and connect with local banking partners. You need to be integrated with the card schemes, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, et cetera. And so it's just like this whole slew of connectivity that you have to do to be a real financial player. And what we were able to do in the last 4 or 5 years is really take all of these primitives, just really, really nitty-gritty things and make them invisible to the customer so that they could then go and go into any country that they want to and open up shop as if they were local within seconds and have it be perfectly seamless.
John Furrier
>> Was this part of the master plan? Because it sounds like a Herculean task to do that. It's no one wakes up and says, hey, I'm gonna just start a global banking system. Or was it— did it just evolve out of necessity? Take us through, because it's not obvious, but now that you've reached critical mass on the fundamentals the foundation, now you got the platform. Who would want to replicate the manual system?
Irvin Sha
>> Yeah, look, especially in the age of AI, I think it's something that we think about quite a lot. We would be absolutely lying if we said that in 2015 someone was thinking that AI is coming in the next handful of years and this is what we need to build in order to support it. And obviously a lot of what ended up happening is that you start building all of these pieces and as the pieces start coming together, you begin to see more possibility for what you could do. You have customers, your customers ask you, hey, look, you have opened up bank accounts for me in all of these different corners of the world. I would really love for you to be able to accept payments on my behalf, or I'd love for you to be able to issue multi-currency cards on my behalf. And that leads to a very natural progression in terms of what are the different types of businesses that your customers would love for you to provide and for us to build into. At the same time, it took a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of investment to make it happen.
John Furrier
>> Um, and more companies are going global now than ever before, and you have a huge sovereignty conversation. So you just have more privacy rules coming in. AI probably can help you guys manage, changes, ingest all the data. they're all PDFs, they're all the documentation. Now, first, knowing everything, and then the cost of changes. Because people might not understand that change one little thing in a country has ripple effects. These things could be now built with intelligence. Talk about that piece of it.
Irvin Sha
>> Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. And I think that the application of AI inside of our own company is just as valuable and impactful to us as our ability to provide AI products to our customers. So when we think about all of the work that it takes to coordinate our rules, our regulations, our protocols across all of the different regions we are in, dozens and dozens of countries all around the world and figuring out where, what are the products that are live in each of these regions? What are the rules and regulations that have to be followed? What are the protocols that need to be handled? It takes a ton of work, and AI has really just not only boosted that level of productivity but also our ability to go and build and develop new products.
John Furrier
>> the thing that I think about when you're talking is, one, I love the fact that you can be global quickly. Yeah, that's one. That's— we're a global economy. But remember the old cell days, mobile days, when you'd leave the US and go to Europe, or you're roaming, what about your roaming charges? Now you have— it's almost seamless now with mobile. No more SIM swaps unless you want to. But when you think about agents, agents are like having that mobility moment where domains are being crossed, boundaries are being crossed, not just corporate boundaries, domains like Geography, like banks. So now you have internal, external multitude of agentic challenges. So when agents are going to help me book a flight, that's easy here in North America, in the US, no problem. But hey, if I want to buy a product, it's available coming out of, say, Africa or another country. Yeah, there's our— there's now— this is currency, this is commerce. Talk about that piece, because this is where agents are going super fast. Transactional.
Irvin Sha
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Trustful. This is a huge conversation right now outside of the security stuff, which I think will be solved pretty quickly. But this commerce piece involves banking, your accounts.
Irvin Sha
>> I think that we look at it as essentially yet another platform shift, right? There was a world in which it used to be that you paid for everything with a card in hand and you swipe a terminal, and then all of a sudden you put that card information into a form on your screen, and that's the next way that you're doing payments. Now we're talking about handing the keys, whether or not that's your bank credentials or your card information, over to some AI agent and trusting it, right? And that is a whole level, that's a whole new thing. And it's frankly a land grab inside of the industry. You're seeing all these different players coming up with new protocols, new different ways to do things. Some of them work in one region, some of them work somewhat differently in another place. And I think that what we're looking at is that we all know that the prize is for, on the global stage, to be able to move just in the same way that you have a cell phone that works in one region and it can hand off to another. It will take a lot of time testing and improvement before we get there. You're already seeing agentic commerce with Muse and Instinct start to take place behind the scenes. There's probably some fine tuning to do. But we know that everything is moving in that direction.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, the architecture is clear. And just some data points to support this next level of conversation, because we have to kind of talk about it, is NVIDIA just announced some open-source security things. They have a runtime boundary, they call it. They have Sentry and BlueField, independent enforcement telemetry. So they're talking full-stack governance. So here's some of the things that happen kind of above and across the infrastructure. Model, what model are you using? Agent, who's the agent? What's the runtime? Identity, authorization, credentials, data, infrastructure, audit. That's kind of like the value chain. That's complicated, so you guys do that. But the opportunity beyond that is identity, delegation, the authority, the credentials, the governance, audit, and then the hybrid environment of domains. This is a complicated technology conversation. This is not for the faint of heart. What's your reaction to that? Because you have in the kind of the architecture on the front end, the NVIDIA full-stack governance, but then you have the opportunity for Airwallex and others to say, look, we're going to handle all this. What's your reaction to that? And what does that mean for the market in terms of agent tech becoming fully trusted, portable, usable in all markets?
Irvin Sha
>> I think the way that we see it, just to take it to a much more abstract layer, is that fundamentally all of these pieces need to work. Every single piece has multiple different providers that are all offering a different solution. So you have multiple layers with multiple solutions and everything needs to sort of start working together. And so you start getting to a place where ultimately, if I'm a merchant and I want to be able to accept payment, I don't want to have to think about all of this stuff. If I'm a consumer at the other end, I don't want to have to pick from a smorgasbord of different options. And maybe there's some degree to which the agent is going to handle all of this for you. But interoperability, I think, is going to become a really, really important part of all of this. And fundamental to all of that is just really, really sussing out which parts of this are safe, not only for the consumer and for the merchant, but also for the providers to ensure that they're not breaching global regulations, that they're not secretly having an agent siphon off, a small percent of the funds to sanctioned countries like Iran or Cuba. Right. There's so many parts of this that not only need to be working, but need to be working to a degree of accuracy that insulates all of the counterparties. That's the massive thing that people need to figure out.
John Furrier
>> Talk about the work you guys have done on the trust side, because essentially agentic is just part of this operating system. Of tech. Yes, trust is what people want. At the end of the day, that's the outcome. I want to trust that my bank's not going to get siphoned off and hacked, and if I'm a merchant, the cash is cash. Or it's like, this is like fundamental psychology. Absolutely. Did I get the money? Yeah, I keep my money. Did I pay for it properly? Yeah.
Irvin Sha
>> So look, like, I think that there's two levels to trust, and this is something that we think about quite a lot, which is like, first, is your product, are your capabilities actually trustworthy, right? Like regardless of what people think about, like, have you earned the trust, right? And so I think that on our side of things, we have 90+ licenses all around the world. We work with dozens and dozens of regulators. We work with dozens of partners like JPMorgan and so on, where essentially that's like a quasi regulator on your business because of the level of scrutiny that they have. And so we've been doing this for over a decade and we think that the record speaks for itself and we're going to continue investing there. Yeah, we got the plumbing.
John Furrier
>> I mean, the plumbing, you plumbed the system. Yeah, it's working. Now you just got to ensure audit, observability, all those things.
Irvin Sha
>> And that's the next piece, which is essentially how do you communicate to the end person that your system is trustworthy, right? We all have these agents that are asking for credentials to our emails, our calendars, our financial records. It's like, Why would I do that? And that's a whole other discussion that I think is in the very, very early—
John Furrier
>> Let's talk about the capital markets, the funding opportunities you guys have. Give us a progress report of where you guys are on funding, revenue, and your goals, because this doomer culture that's kind of emerged, I think there's an election midterm coming up. So my personal opinion, but there's a lot of people who just don't know. They still think OpenAI is a chatbot. They don't understand there's multi-step reasoning involved and there's all kinds of new computing architectures emerging and trusted players and platforms like you guys. There's a whole, whoa, what's going on? So talk about that piece of it and the momentum around fundraising, because I think that that's a boon for you, because if the market's scared, the flight to quality kicks in. I'm sure the investor market loves you guys right now. So talk about that piece. What are some of the conversations Give some stats on where you're at and what you're looking to do.
Irvin Sha
>> Yeah, absolutely. So we have done 3 rounds in fairly rapid succession. So call it from May of last year through the first half of this year, we raised our Series F, our G, and H. The F was at a $6 billion valuation. The H was at an $11 billion valuation. so that was, call it cumulatively, about $960 million or so of capital just in those 3 rounds alone. And we've brought in lots of great investors that we're very happy to partner with. We've been growing at, call it, 60+ percent year over year, we're doing run rate about $1.4 billion of revenue. So not only is this growth, not only is this valuation going up, but we're growing all of this at scale. And I think that the thing that we're proud about is that we're doing this in a way that we think is safe and conservative and is based off of real-world results and a whole lot less on any sort of hype cycle.
John Furrier
>> Talk about the operating leverage you guys get out of the platform play, because I think it's not just a service business. I mean, there's service involved, obviously, but there's technology. You get a lot of leverage. Absolutely. How about that piece of it?
Irvin Sha
>> Yeah, so a lot of what we've built is basically a global technical architecture that is mostly a fixed-cost type of business, right? We spend a lot of money, but that's mainly on research, development, building out into more countries, more markets, more capabilities. If you strip out all of that stuff Basically every single customer and every dollar of transaction volume that goes over our rails, that's pure incremental margin for us. And so as we think about going global, and we are in every single major market in the world today, the opportunity for us to continue to grow and scale into that is just, it just keeps going. Well, awesome.
John Furrier
>> Congratulations. Love to see the global platform. It's a global market. Final question. As sovereignty moves from cloud where the data is stored to AI sovereignty, which now has this enterprise component because it's not just country, there's revenue involved. Okay. AI creates tokens, create revenue, intelligence creates more value. There's starting to be a conversation around sovereignty tracking. I'd imagine you guys are perfectly positioned with your platform, not just on transactions, but managing a lot of these sovereignty discussions. Are you in those? Is the toe in the water? Are you full in the deep end?
Irvin Sha
>> There's certainly a larger discussion that we are not part of around who owns your information, where does that go? And that will continue to be happening. I think that the part that we find where we have our own advantage is that because we manage the way that you accept, hold, and spend your money all around the globe, there is a degree of information and context that we are able to put together for our customers that is unique to our platform. And we think that all of that, the value to our customers is that they will be able to see and understand that in ways that they've never seen before.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, I think that's the key to AI sovereignty, not so much the cloud privacy, which is cool. That's an important conversation. You don't want your bank to share your information with someone else.
Irvin Sha
>> So why would we do that?
John Furrier
>> Yeah, you just check the box on that. But the revenue piece, gets everyone's attention. Thank you. All right. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Very good to chat. I'm John Furrier here. We're checking out the Hallway Conversations. on theCUBE. Talk to the experts as well, the founders and the entrepreneurs and the leaders here at the B of A Private Tech Trailblazers event. It's a gathering of industry participants, investors, all trying to figure out, what's going to happen. Also where the growth is. We're doing our part to bring you the data. Thanks for watching.
>> John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, my hometown. Of course, this is where all the action is. We are at the B of A Private Tech Trailblazers event. It's essentially an investor conference. It really showcases the private companies that have escape velocity, have momentum, and obviously in the age of AI, they have secret sauce. Our next guest, Irvin Sha, he's the head of corporate development, capital markets, and investor relations at Airwallex, a fast-growing company. Billions in transactions, more than a unicorn. I think you're at an $11 billion valuation.
Irvin Sha
>> That is correct.
John Furrier
>> Congratulations. Welcome. Welcome to theCUBE. Appreciate it.
Irvin Sha
>> Thank you for having me.
John Furrier
>> So a little makeshift studio here at the Four Seasons. The conference is going on in the hallways. The buzz is all about, okay, who's hitting escape velocity? Who's going public? What's the financing M&A activity? You guys are in a sweet spot because you're doing financial software with agentic AI. Explain what you guys do and why you're successful.
Irvin Sha
>> Yeah, fantastic. Airwallex is a global financial banking operating system. So essentially what we do is that we enable businesses from small, mid-sized businesses all the way up to mid-market/enterprise to essentially go global with the same set of resources that a Fortune 500 company would be able to do. So in the past, you would need to go and get a team in any country that you go to, get a local bank account, a payment provider, all of these kinds of things. And then you'd have to do that country by country by country. If you use us, then you can essentially go and do all of that in any of the top 80 to 100 economies in the world. And increasingly now with the advent of AI, what we can do is that we can layer intelligence on top of all of these things. So not only is it you have a bank account and you've got transactions coming in, but we can actually parse for you all of the things that are happening. And so you can not only see and understand what's happening with your business, but you can actually ask your agent to take action on your behalf.
John Furrier
>> Talk about the company evolution. You guys were founded over a decade ago. So as the world evolves— AI was coming online probably a couple of years after you formed, when the research started hitting the scene. There's a lot of regulations. You
Irvin Sha
>> mentioned—Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> Outside the United States. Hassles, paperwork, process, old school antiquated systems. What was, what was the key breakthrough? And then talk about the AI moment where that kicked in for you guys.
Irvin Sha
>> Yeah, absolutely. So honestly, the company was founded in Melbourne in 2015, and the first, I'd say, 5 to 8 years of this company were really building from the ground up the financial infrastructure that would enable us to move money around the world in the same way that, a multinational company would really want to do as well. And so that involved getting licenses for all of the different types of activities that you need to do. In some cases, you need a different license for accepting payments versus a license that you would use to hold money. and so getting licenses for all of those different activities in every single corner of the world. On top of that, you need to go and connect with local banking partners. You need to be integrated with the card schemes, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, et cetera. And so it's just like this whole slew of connectivity that you have to do to be a real financial player. And what we were able to do in the last 4 or 5 years is really take all of these primitives, just really, really nitty-gritty things and make them invisible to the customer so that they could then go and go into any country that they want to and open up shop as if they were local within seconds and have it be perfectly seamless.
John Furrier
>> Was this part of the master plan? Because it sounds like a Herculean task to do that. It's no one wakes up and says, hey, I'm gonna just start a global banking system. Or was it— did it just evolve out of necessity? Take us through, because it's not obvious, but now that you've reached critical mass on the fundamentals the foundation, now you got the platform. Who would want to replicate the manual system?
Irvin Sha
>> Yeah, look, especially in the age of AI, I think it's something that we think about quite a lot. We would be absolutely lying if we said that in 2015 someone was thinking that AI is coming in the next handful of years and this is what we need to build in order to support it. And obviously a lot of what ended up happening is that you start building all of these pieces and as the pieces start coming together, you begin to see more possibility for what you could do. You have customers, your customers ask you, hey, look, you have opened up bank accounts for me in all of these different corners of the world. I would really love for you to be able to accept payments on my behalf, or I'd love for you to be able to issue multi-currency cards on my behalf. And that leads to a very natural progression in terms of what are the different types of businesses that your customers would love for you to provide and for us to build into. At the same time, it took a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of investment to make it happen.
John Furrier
>> Um, and more companies are going global now than ever before, and you have a huge sovereignty conversation. So you just have more privacy rules coming in. AI probably can help you guys manage, changes, ingest all the data. they're all PDFs, they're all the documentation. Now, first, knowing everything, and then the cost of changes. Because people might not understand that change one little thing in a country has ripple effects. These things could be now built with intelligence. Talk about that piece of it.
Irvin Sha
>> Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. And I think that the application of AI inside of our own company is just as valuable and impactful to us as our ability to provide AI products to our customers. So when we think about all of the work that it takes to coordinate our rules, our regulations, our protocols across all of the different regions we are in, dozens and dozens of countries all around the world and figuring out where, what are the products that are live in each of these regions? What are the rules and regulations that have to be followed? What are the protocols that need to be handled? It takes a ton of work, and AI has really just not only boosted that level of productivity but also our ability to go and build and develop new products.
John Furrier
>> the thing that I think about when you're talking is, one, I love the fact that you can be global quickly. Yeah, that's one. That's— we're a global economy. But remember the old cell days, mobile days, when you'd leave the US and go to Europe, or you're roaming, what about your roaming charges? Now you have— it's almost seamless now with mobile. No more SIM swaps unless you want to. But when you think about agents, agents are like having that mobility moment where domains are being crossed, boundaries are being crossed, not just corporate boundaries, domains like Geography, like banks. So now you have internal, external multitude of agentic challenges. So when agents are going to help me book a flight, that's easy here in North America, in the US, no problem. But hey, if I want to buy a product, it's available coming out of, say, Africa or another country. Yeah, there's our— there's now— this is currency, this is commerce. Talk about that piece, because this is where agents are going super fast. Transactional.
Irvin Sha
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Trustful. This is a huge conversation right now outside of the security stuff, which I think will be solved pretty quickly. But this commerce piece involves banking, your accounts.
Irvin Sha
>> I think that we look at it as essentially yet another platform shift, right? There was a world in which it used to be that you paid for everything with a card in hand and you swipe a terminal, and then all of a sudden you put that card information into a form on your screen, and that's the next way that you're doing payments. Now we're talking about handing the keys, whether or not that's your bank credentials or your card information, over to some AI agent and trusting it, right? And that is a whole level, that's a whole new thing. And it's frankly a land grab inside of the industry. You're seeing all these different players coming up with new protocols, new different ways to do things. Some of them work in one region, some of them work somewhat differently in another place. And I think that what we're looking at is that we all know that the prize is for, on the global stage, to be able to move just in the same way that you have a cell phone that works in one region and it can hand off to another. It will take a lot of time testing and improvement before we get there. You're already seeing agentic commerce with Muse and Instinct start to take place behind the scenes. There's probably some fine tuning to do. But we know that everything is moving in that direction.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, the architecture is clear. And just some data points to support this next level of conversation, because we have to kind of talk about it, is NVIDIA just announced some open-source security things. They have a runtime boundary, they call it. They have Sentry and BlueField, independent enforcement telemetry. So they're talking full-stack governance. So here's some of the things that happen kind of above and across the infrastructure. Model, what model are you using? Agent, who's the agent? What's the runtime? Identity, authorization, credentials, data, infrastructure, audit. That's kind of like the value chain. That's complicated, so you guys do that. But the opportunity beyond that is identity, delegation, the authority, the credentials, the governance, audit, and then the hybrid environment of domains. This is a complicated technology conversation. This is not for the faint of heart. What's your reaction to that? Because you have in the kind of the architecture on the front end, the NVIDIA full-stack governance, but then you have the opportunity for Airwallex and others to say, look, we're going to handle all this. What's your reaction to that? And what does that mean for the market in terms of agent tech becoming fully trusted, portable, usable in all markets?
Irvin Sha
>> I think the way that we see it, just to take it to a much more abstract layer, is that fundamentally all of these pieces need to work. Every single piece has multiple different providers that are all offering a different solution. So you have multiple layers with multiple solutions and everything needs to sort of start working together. And so you start getting to a place where ultimately, if I'm a merchant and I want to be able to accept payment, I don't want to have to think about all of this stuff. If I'm a consumer at the other end, I don't want to have to pick from a smorgasbord of different options. And maybe there's some degree to which the agent is going to handle all of this for you. But interoperability, I think, is going to become a really, really important part of all of this. And fundamental to all of that is just really, really sussing out which parts of this are safe, not only for the consumer and for the merchant, but also for the providers to ensure that they're not breaching global regulations, that they're not secretly having an agent siphon off, a small percent of the funds to sanctioned countries like Iran or Cuba. Right. There's so many parts of this that not only need to be working, but need to be working to a degree of accuracy that insulates all of the counterparties. That's the massive thing that people need to figure out.
John Furrier
>> Talk about the work you guys have done on the trust side, because essentially agentic is just part of this operating system. Of tech. Yes, trust is what people want. At the end of the day, that's the outcome. I want to trust that my bank's not going to get siphoned off and hacked, and if I'm a merchant, the cash is cash. Or it's like, this is like fundamental psychology. Absolutely. Did I get the money? Yeah, I keep my money. Did I pay for it properly? Yeah.
Irvin Sha
>> So look, like, I think that there's two levels to trust, and this is something that we think about quite a lot, which is like, first, is your product, are your capabilities actually trustworthy, right? Like regardless of what people think about, like, have you earned the trust, right? And so I think that on our side of things, we have 90+ licenses all around the world. We work with dozens and dozens of regulators. We work with dozens of partners like JPMorgan and so on, where essentially that's like a quasi regulator on your business because of the level of scrutiny that they have. And so we've been doing this for over a decade and we think that the record speaks for itself and we're going to continue investing there. Yeah, we got the plumbing.
John Furrier
>> I mean, the plumbing, you plumbed the system. Yeah, it's working. Now you just got to ensure audit, observability, all those things.
Irvin Sha
>> And that's the next piece, which is essentially how do you communicate to the end person that your system is trustworthy, right? We all have these agents that are asking for credentials to our emails, our calendars, our financial records. It's like, Why would I do that? And that's a whole other discussion that I think is in the very, very early—
John Furrier
>> Let's talk about the capital markets, the funding opportunities you guys have. Give us a progress report of where you guys are on funding, revenue, and your goals, because this doomer culture that's kind of emerged, I think there's an election midterm coming up. So my personal opinion, but there's a lot of people who just don't know. They still think OpenAI is a chatbot. They don't understand there's multi-step reasoning involved and there's all kinds of new computing architectures emerging and trusted players and platforms like you guys. There's a whole, whoa, what's going on? So talk about that piece of it and the momentum around fundraising, because I think that that's a boon for you, because if the market's scared, the flight to quality kicks in. I'm sure the investor market loves you guys right now. So talk about that piece. What are some of the conversations Give some stats on where you're at and what you're looking to do.
Irvin Sha
>> Yeah, absolutely. So we have done 3 rounds in fairly rapid succession. So call it from May of last year through the first half of this year, we raised our Series F, our G, and H. The F was at a $6 billion valuation. The H was at an $11 billion valuation. so that was, call it cumulatively, about $960 million or so of capital just in those 3 rounds alone. And we've brought in lots of great investors that we're very happy to partner with. We've been growing at, call it, 60+ percent year over year, we're doing run rate about $1.4 billion of revenue. So not only is this growth, not only is this valuation going up, but we're growing all of this at scale. And I think that the thing that we're proud about is that we're doing this in a way that we think is safe and conservative and is based off of real-world results and a whole lot less on any sort of hype cycle.
John Furrier
>> Talk about the operating leverage you guys get out of the platform play, because I think it's not just a service business. I mean, there's service involved, obviously, but there's technology. You get a lot of leverage. Absolutely. How about that piece of it?
Irvin Sha
>> Yeah, so a lot of what we've built is basically a global technical architecture that is mostly a fixed-cost type of business, right? We spend a lot of money, but that's mainly on research, development, building out into more countries, more markets, more capabilities. If you strip out all of that stuff Basically every single customer and every dollar of transaction volume that goes over our rails, that's pure incremental margin for us. And so as we think about going global, and we are in every single major market in the world today, the opportunity for us to continue to grow and scale into that is just, it just keeps going. Well, awesome.
John Furrier
>> Congratulations. Love to see the global platform. It's a global market. Final question. As sovereignty moves from cloud where the data is stored to AI sovereignty, which now has this enterprise component because it's not just country, there's revenue involved. Okay. AI creates tokens, create revenue, intelligence creates more value. There's starting to be a conversation around sovereignty tracking. I'd imagine you guys are perfectly positioned with your platform, not just on transactions, but managing a lot of these sovereignty discussions. Are you in those? Is the toe in the water? Are you full in the deep end?
Irvin Sha
>> There's certainly a larger discussion that we are not part of around who owns your information, where does that go? And that will continue to be happening. I think that the part that we find where we have our own advantage is that because we manage the way that you accept, hold, and spend your money all around the globe, there is a degree of information and context that we are able to put together for our customers that is unique to our platform. And we think that all of that, the value to our customers is that they will be able to see and understand that in ways that they've never seen before.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, I think that's the key to AI sovereignty, not so much the cloud privacy, which is cool. That's an important conversation. You don't want your bank to share your information with someone else.
Irvin Sha
>> So why would we do that?
John Furrier
>> Yeah, you just check the box on that. But the revenue piece, gets everyone's attention. Thank you. All right. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Very good to chat. I'm John Furrier here. We're checking out the Hallway Conversations. on theCUBE. Talk to the experts as well, the founders and the entrepreneurs and the leaders here at the B of A Private Tech Trailblazers event. It's a gathering of industry participants, investors, all trying to figure out, what's going to happen. Also where the growth is. We're doing our part to bring you the data. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier
Irvin Sha