Airwallex Backs 10 AI Startups with $1 Million in Non-Dilutive Grants

The equity-free grants flow through the first cohort of Latitude 37, the fintech's program unveiled back in April by co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang. Each individual ticket is small. But the structure tells you exactly where Airwallex wants to be positioned in the AI stack: as infrastructure, and as a distribution channel for its own payment rails.

A grant program dressed as venture

Latitude 37 is not priced equity. It is a $100,000 non-dilutive cheque per startup, layered with on-site rotations through Airwallex's Singapore and San Francisco offices — both company headquarters — and direct access to its customer and investor network. For an early-stage founder burning through runway, the SF/Singapore leg and warm intros to enterprise buyers likely outweigh the cash component. For Airwallex, the cost is a rounding error against its own balance sheet, and the upside is a curated pipeline of AI-native tools it can integrate, resell to, or simply learn from. Call it what it is: customer acquisition dressed up as philanthropy, with a founder-friendly label attached.

The wider AI cheque book

The Airwallex deployment slots into a late-summer cluster of small-to-mid AI rounds across multiple geographies. Finextra reports Neno, an AI-native financial services startup, closed €6.6 million. Indian Startup News notes TrucksUp, an AI-driven digital freight marketplace, raised $8.2 million. Kenyan lender Flowt also secured fresh funding to expand its AI lending platform, per We are Tech. None of these are mega-rounds. But the cadence matters: AI capital is actively moving through second-tier geographies and verticalised applications — fintech, freight, lending — rather than concentrating solely on foundation-model labs in the US.

That dispersion is itself the story. The real infrastructure money, by contrast, remains eye-watering. The $240 million Together AI and IBM partnership on NVIDIA B300 inference infrastructure dwarfs every cheque mentioned above. The contrast is sharp: corporate AI infrastructure spending and seed-stage AI grant programs are running on entirely different funding rails, with entirely different multiples and entirely different exit clocks.

What to watch

Latitude 37's second cohort will be the real tell — whether the program scales meaningfully in dollar terms or remains a marketing line item on Airwallex's annual report. The startups that convert customer intros into paying enterprise contracts within twelve months will validate the funnel thesis. Those that don't will quietly disappear from the cohort list. As ever in this market, follow the conversion metrics and the renewal rates. Ignore the press release.