Airwallex Launches Latitude 37, A $1 Million Yearly Program Funding Australian AI Founders Under 25

Airwallex co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang has launched Latitude 37, a new initiative that will hand $100,000 in equity-free capital to ten or more Australian AI founders aged 25 and under each year, putting more than $1 million annually behind early-stage AI companies built by the country’s youngest builders.

The program, announced on Monday, is named after Melbourne’s latitude, the city where Airwallex was founded in 2015 before it grew into one of Australia’s most valuable tech exports. Latitude 37 sits inside Airwallex Impact, the company’s global Pledge 1% commitment, which Airwallex says now carries a value of more than US$56 million.

What founders get

Each successful applicant receives $100,000 in equity-free capital, mentorship from Airwallex’s leadership and operating teams, access to the company’s global network across more than 100 countries, and immersion tours in San Francisco and Singapore — two of the cities where Airwallex operates major hubs.

The capital is non-dilutive. In a blog post explaining the program, Zhang argued that the first year of company-building is when founders give away ownership at the lowest cost and protect themselves the least, and that Latitude 37 is designed to lengthen that runway without taking a slice of the cap table.

Applications open in late May 2026, with the first cohort selected later in the year.

Why under-25?

Latitude 37 is unusually narrow on age. Almost no other equity-free Australian program ties eligibility to a specific age band, and the cut-off lands well below the median age of incoming Y Combinator and Antler cohorts.

Zhang has framed the bet as one about generational opportunity. AI tooling, he’s argued, has collapsed the cost and time required to build software, meaning a 22-year-old in Sydney with a laptop can now ship the kind of product that used to need a ten-person dev team and a lot of funding. 

How Latitude 37 fits Australia’s AI funding map

Australia’s startup funding rebounded to $1.8 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up 63% on the same quarter last year, with AI-first and AI-enabled companies accounting for the lion’s share of activity. But that growth has been concentrated at the top of the stack — sub-$5 million rounds are at multi-year lows, and the country’s “missing middle” between seed and Series A has widened.

Programs like Latitude 37 sit further upstream than the missing middle, in a stage where most Australian capital has historically been thin: pre-product, pre-team, pre-revenue. UNSW Founders’ 10X accelerator, which is currently accepting applications until May 18th, provides $100,000 in funding alongside ten weeks of programming. Airwallex’s program is comparable in cheque size but younger in target audience and lighter on programming, leaning instead on global mobility and access to operators inside one of Australia’s most-watched tech companies.

Side Stage Ventures, the operator-led fund backed by founders of Linktree, Airwallex, Canva, Airtasker, and Aconex, also recently announced a first close of $40 million for its second fund, bringing more operator capital into the same early-stage pool.

Latitude 37 is the latest sign that successful Australian founders are taking a more direct role in capitalising the next wave. Capital 49, the early-stage investment vehicle Zhang runs alongside his Airwallex day job, has been one of the more active operator-led cheques in the region, and Latitude 37 effectively extends that thesis to a younger cohort and a public, structured program.

For aspiring AI founders in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane, or anywhere else outside Sydney and Melbourne, the program’s distance-friendly mechanics — equity-free cash, time in San Francisco and Singapore, and a national application process — could be worthwhile to gain access to international networks that are otherwise hard to access from a smaller city.

You can register your interest here.