Airwallex crypto sceptic Jack Zhang’s new blockchain side hustle just raised a $67 million Series A

Detailed summary

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...

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.

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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.

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