Australian fintech funding more than doubled in the 2026 financial year, but the headline figure was all down to one Singapore- and San Francisco-headquartered company – Airwallex.
Fintech raised $1.73 billion across 53 disclosed rounds, a new report from Dom Pym’s fintech VC fund Triple Bubble and Cut Through Venture found. While funding was up 137% from FY25’s $730 million, the number of deals hit the lowest level in the report’s seven-year dataset at 54.
The sector still scooped up 23% of the total local startup capital deployed during the year, and since FY20, the category has raised more than $12 billion across 564 deals.
The release of the report coincides with Fintech Week and the annual Fintech Australia conference Intersekt.
Triple Bubble cofounder Dom Pym said the numbers aren’t a comeback for Australian fintech because it never went away.
“The sector has continued to produce significant companies, attract global capital and reinvent itself through successive waves of innovation,” he said.
” And the opportunity is more relevant than ever, extending well beyond digital banking and BNPL into payments, wealth, AI, digital identity, stablecoins and the next generation of financial infrastructure.”
Fintech underfunded
However, Pym argues local fintech is underfunded.
“Australia has relatively few specialist fintech investors and there is enormous scope for more domestic capital to participate in the sector and back the next generation of globally significant Australian fintech companies,” he said.
Interestingly amid AI’s investor fervour AI-first fintechs received only 15% of the sector’s capital, down from 25% in FY25. Over the two financial years, AI companies represented 47% of early-stage fintech deals, suggesting AI activity remains concentrated in smaller and earlier-stage rounds.
Triple Bubble head of venture and report author Poppy Trewhella said that fintech is a huge category that wins big when it wins.
“But declining deal counts, ESVCLP constraints and competition from international capital mean we are not capturing its full potential locally,” she said.
“Since Triple Bubble began deploying earlier this year, we’ve seen hundreds of opportunities, including far more high-quality companies than we could possibly pursue. The pipeline is there but we need to make sure it isn’t neglected if we want Australia to keep producing the next generation of fintech unicorns.”
An estimated 20% of fintech deals were ineligible for ESVCLP investment in FY26, compared with just 3% of non-fintech deals. The report suggests the gap may particularly affect regulated and capital-intensive fintech companies, which may need to rely on alternative investment structures or international investors.
Airwallex dominates
Regardless, Airwallex was the elephant in the raising room. Two rounds, December 2025’s $498m Series G at a US$8bn valuation, and then just six months later in June this year, a $460 million Series H (with another 37% jump in the payments platform’s valuation) represented 56% of all Australian fintech funding for the year. Much of that capital came from offshore
That left around $772 million for every other fintech. With Airwallex excluded, sector funding increased by about 5%. And even then, the investments were concentrated with the 10 largest deals accounting for 91% of all fintech capital – that figure was 48% across the rest of local startup market – and the top 3, 62%.
Banking and B2B financial infrastructure attracted $1.1 billion from just four deals. Wealth and investment ranked second, raising $305.7 million across 10 deals, followed by payments and acceptance with $170.3 million across six.
The funding pipeline remained thin. Just six Series B or later rounds were recorded, down from 29 at the FY22 peak. Airwallex took 74% of the $1.3 billion invested at Series B and beyond.
Earlier-stage companies had a different year. Fintechs raised $93 million across 17 Seed rounds, but the median Seed cheque fell 43% to $2.3 million, its second-lowest level since FY20. Angel and pre-Seed rounds recorded a higher median of $2.7 million, but only eight deals were completed, accounting for $19.8 million in total.
International investors remained central to the market. At least one international investor participated in 55% of fintech deals, and those rounds accounted for 93% of the capital raised.
The report tracked equity capital invested in exchange for ownership and excluded venture debt, grants, prizes and secondary share transactions.
