Airwallex cofounder and CEO Jack Zhang has a side hustle – a fintech blockchain startup, this time, which has raised $114 million across its Seed and Series A rounds in the last two months.
Alta, previously known as Metal, launched in June, is based in Melbourne and San Francisco, and help banks settle payments 24/7 using blockchain.
Today it announced a US$47.5 million ($67m) Series A round at an undisclosed valuation, led by Index Ventures with support from Google’s venture arm GV, Australian VCs Blackbird and Square Peg, and Capital 49, the investment firm set up by Airwallex’s founders.
The funding will go hiring engineers and compliance specialists, blockchain development and onboarding banks and payment providers to Alta’s network.
Zhang cofounded the fintech with serial entrepreneur Loong Wang and former Meta crypto developer Catherine Porter.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s Alameda Research bought Wang’s first blockchain startup, Ren, in 2021. Wang went on to cofound computational chemistry startup QDX. Porter led global partnerships for Libra, Meta’s failed attempt at a digital currency.
A mutual friend introduced Zhang and Wang last December. The two Melburnians got talking about stablecoins, digital tokens typically pegged to a currency such as the US dollar. Zhang then introduced Wang to Index Ventures, whose partners had known the Airwallex boss for about a decade.
Zhang was an unlikely blockchain founder, given his previous views on crypto.
“After 15 years, I still haven’t seen a single use case where crypto has meaningfully helped solve a real problem,” he wrote on LinkedIn in June 2025.
But now he’s a convert when AI agents make payments, believing that a stablecoin wallet with a fixed balance would let the business cap the agent’s spending and avoid a card fee on every purchase.
“With the rise of agentic banking and programmable payments, stablecoins are becoming an important vector for settlement,” Zhang said.
“Financial institutions need blockchain infrastructure that is private, neutral, regulated, and connected to global fiat rails. Alta is building exactly that.”
Airwallex, valued at US$11 billion in its $460m June Series H, plans to connect Alta to local payment networks across 200 countries and 90 currencies, so customers can move between stablecoins and conventional money. Alta says other banks and payment providers will be able to use the network, including Airwallex competitors.
Alta’s first product is aimed at corporate treasury teams. The idea is to let a business earn interest on spare cash in a tokenised fund, then redeem it and convert currencies the moment a payment falls due.
There’s a catch for banks using a public blockchain. Anyone who knows a customer’s wallet address can look up their transactions. Alta’s answer is a piece of cryptography called a zero-knowledge proof. A bank can verify, for example, that a payment meets its sanctions rules without publishing its customer’s identity, balance or transaction details on the blockchain.
Index Ventures partner Jan Hammer described Loong as “the sort of technologist you only meet a few times in a career” .
“After a major fintech exit from his first company, he went on to run the largest supercomputing calculation in history at its time, then discovered a cancer drug now in human trials,” he said.
“With Catherine’s exceptional track record of bringing industry leaders to the table and Jack’s understanding of the problem space, this is a team we had to back.”
