Immad Akhund knew banking was broken in 2013. He did not start Mercury until 2017. For four years, he waited for someone else to do it.
The waiting was not laziness. It was a rational calculation by a founder who had watched Stripe, Gusto, Slack, and Rippling transform adjacent categories and assumed that someone with the right fintech background would apply the same pattern to business banking. He was running Heyzap, a mobile advertising platform that had started as a flash game network and gone through multiple pivots before finding its product-market fit. He was too busy and, he believed, not the right person to build a bank.
He was wrong about that second part.
After Heyzap sold to Fyber in 2016 for $45 million, Akhund spent time as an angel investor. He backed over 200 startups. In every portfolio conversation, the same frustrations surfaced: opening a business bank account required in-person branch visits, excessive paperwork, lengthy approval processes, and produced an interface so bad it felt like software from a decade earlier. Even funded startups with money in the bank couldn’t get access to basic corporate cards from traditional institutions. The underwriting models that banks used were built for established businesses with credit history, not for companies that were three months old and had just raised $2 million from Sequoia.
Akhund had personally sent hundreds of wire transfers manually at Heyzap, dealt with cash flow constraints imposed by banking friction that had nothing to do with the actual health of his business, and watched his co-founders navigate the same problems. When he looked at the startup ecosystem as an angel and found the problem everywhere, he stopped waiting for someone else.
He co-founded Mercury in 2017 with Max Tagher, his CTO from Heyzap, and Jason Zhang, his VP of business development from the same company. The three of them had worked together before. They trusted each other. They understood the problem from the founder’s side. They spent the next eighteen months building something nobody had asked them to build.
The Nineteen Years That Made the Founder
Immad Akhund is, by his own accounting, a four-time serial entrepreneur who had been doing startups for nineteen years by the time he described it in an interview. The trajectory matters because Mercury’s specific product philosophy, what Akhund called the “minimum delightful product,” came directly from the accumulated experience of watching ideas succeed and fail across a decade and a half.
His first company was a British version of Yelp, started after a year as an engineer at Bloomberg. It lasted seven months. He moved to San Francisco, got into Y Combinator with a developer tool for access management, attracted millions of users, failed to find a monetization path, and was acqui-hired. Two companies, zero meaningful exits.
Heyzap lasted six years and three pivots. It started as a flash gaming network, evolved through several forms, and eventually became a mobile ad optimization platform that let apps connect to and manage multiple ad networks simultaneously. When that product found traction, revenue grew substantially in consecutive years. The sale to Fyber for $45 million in 2016 was a real outcome.
Across those years, Akhund developed a specific kind of pattern recognition. He watched how the tools available to startup founders changed: Stripe for payments, Gusto for payroll, Slack for team communication, Rippling for HR and IT management. Each of these products took something that had been painful and slow and administered by people in offices, and replaced it with software that was fast, self-serve, API-accessible, and genuinely pleasant to use.
The contrast with business banking was jarring. When Akhund started his second company at YC, representatives from ADP arrived at his office carrying literal briefcases filled with files to sign for payroll. Then Gusto came along and digitized the entire process. Banking had not had its Gusto moment. The interfaces were still bad. The onboarding still required branch visits. The wire transfer process still required manual work. The underwriting still couldn’t evaluate a funded startup accurately.
In 2013, Akhund met the founders of TrueLink, a YC startup building secure debit cards for seniors. TrueLink had partnered with a bank to launch their product. The encounter clarified something for him: you could partner with a bank to offer financial products without becoming a bank yourself. The model that would become Mercury, a fintech company using bank partnerships to offer banking services to a specific customer segment, was already working in other categories. The gap was in applying it to startups.
He waited four more years anyway. Then he built it.
Three Months, Sixty Banks, a Hundred Founders
Before Akhund, Tagher, and Zhang wrote a meaningful line of product code, they did the work that most financial technology founders skip: they understood the regulatory and infrastructure landscape in depth.
Akhund spent three months meeting with approximately 60 banks and over 100 founders. The bank meetings were about understanding what was possible: which banks were willing to be infrastructure partners for a fintech company serving startups, what compliance requirements would govern the relationship, how the economics of the partnership would work, and what limitations the partnership model imposed relative to holding a bank charter.
The charter question was an important early decision. Mercury could have pursued an industrial bank charter, which would have given it more direct control over lending and deposit management but required years of regulatory approval processes and enormous capital requirements. Several fintech companies that attempted the charter route in the same period failed to complete the process or found it took much longer than expected. Varo, a consumer neobank competitor, pursued the charter and spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars obtaining it. Chime went the sponsor bank model route and built a much larger business faster.
Mercury chose the sponsor bank partnership model: partner with regulated banks who hold deposits, provide FDIC insurance, and handle the regulatory compliance, while Mercury builds the product layer on top. The initial banking partners were Evolve Bank & Trust and Choice Financial Group. This choice preserved Mercury’s ability to move fast on product while accepting the constraint that it could not lend against deposits the way a chartered bank could.
The founder conversations gave Akhund something different: validation that the market existed and a clear picture of what the ideal product needed to do from day one. He did not iterate toward a working product from a minimal MVP. He built something complete before launching.
The philosophy behind this choice was specific: competing with legacy banking providers meant Mercury couldn’t launch with a semi-functional MVP. If the product had bugs, slow wire transfers, or missing features on day one, founders would go back to their existing banks and might not return. The switching cost was not high enough to keep frustrated early adopters. The product needed to be good enough to retain people who tried it, from the very first day.
Akhund called what they built the “minimum delightful product”: domestic and international wires, multi-user permissions, a clean UI, support for immigrant founders who lacked US credit history, and zero-fee banking. All of it working reliably from launch.
The First Hire Was a Designer
Mercury raised its seed round in 2017: $6 million from Andreessen Horowitz, facilitated through a conversation with a16z partner Alex Rampell that started as a request for fintech industry advice and quickly became a term sheet. The round allowed the team to grow from three co-founders to nine people. The first hire was a product designer named Juliana Vislova.
This was a deliberate signal about what Mercury was. The conventional fintech hiring pattern prioritizes compliance officers, banking relationship managers, and backend engineers. Mercury’s first external hire was a designer because design was the core of the differentiation thesis. The product needed to feel like software that someone who cared about user experience had built, not like a bank’s online portal with a startup sticker on it.
The visual and interaction quality of Mercury’s interface became one of its most recognized attributes. Founders who opened Mercury accounts often described the experience with language that sounded more like product reviews than banking testimonials: clean, fast, intuitive, nothing like dealing with a bank. The dashboard organized information the way a founder actually needed to see it. Wires were sent in minutes rather than days. Card controls and team permissions were accessible without calling a representative. The API gave technical teams programmatic access to their banking data.
The UI quality was not incidental. Akhund understood that a significant portion of Mercury’s addressable market was developers, CTOs, and technically sophisticated founders who were making the banking choice for their companies. These were people who had strong opinions about software design and would be using Mercury’s interface daily for years. A product that felt like software that respected its users would spread through the founder community by word of mouth. A product that felt like a bank’s digital portal, however improved, would not.
Mercury also made a specific product decision that addressed a genuine pain point in the startup community: the company accepted immigrant founders from day one. Traditional US banks required Social Security numbers and US credit history for business accounts, which excluded a significant portion of startup founders who had moved to the US to build companies but hadn’t yet established US credit histories. Mercury’s onboarding accepted international identification and built its underwriting around the company’s financial health rather than the founder’s personal credit profile. This decision made Mercury the default choice for a substantial population that had been structurally excluded from easy banking access.
The April 2019 Launch and the $1 Million Transfer
Mercury launched its private alpha in April 2019. Within the first week, before they had done any meaningful marketing, a customer signed up, never spoke to anyone at the company, and transferred $1 million into their Mercury account.
Akhund has described his reaction to this as a genuine moment of disbelief. Someone had found their product, evaluated it entirely through the product experience without human interaction, decided to trust it with a million dollars, and moved on. That was the clearest possible signal that the product did what it was supposed to do.
The company grew 30 to 40 percent month-over-month following the public launch. The growth was almost entirely product-led, driven by word of mouth in the founder and startup community. The cap table strategy that accompanied the Series A, which closed shortly after launch at terms led by CRV, amplified this distribution. Mercury brought in approximately 40 investors on the round, including a specific set of high-profile names: Nick Jonas, Larry Fitzgerald, Serena Williams’ Serena Ventures, Will Smith’s Dreamers Fund, Kevin Durant’s 35V, and a list of founder names including Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra, Lyft and Presto co-founder Rajat Suri, Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen, and others.
The celebrity investor strategy was not accidental. Akhund was explicit about its purpose: having recognizable people on your cap table helps establish your company’s brand. In Mercury’s case it served two functions simultaneously. It generated press coverage that put Mercury in front of founders who had never heard of it. More practically, it signaled to the founder community that people who had built large things trusted Mercury with their financial infrastructure. If Kevin Durant and Will Smith had Mercury accounts, it was probably safe.
The Series A cap table also included a density of operator-founders who would naturally recommend Mercury to the companies they invested in, advised, or mentored. Every founder investor was a potential champion in exactly the community Mercury was trying to reach.
The Profitability-First Approach
Mercury went more than four years between its Series A and its Series B. The Series B closed in 2021. The Series C didn’t come until March 2025. The company raised $300 million in the Series C from Sequoia with participation from Coatue, CRV, Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, and Marathon.
Akhund’s explanation for the infrequent fundraising pace was consistent across interviews: he didn’t understand the strategy of raising every six to nine months because “you don’t make that much progress between those” rounds. The subtext was that Mercury could afford to be selective because it didn’t need the money.
Mercury was profitable on both EBITDA and GAAP net income for ten consecutive quarters as of March 2025. The company had been GAAP profitable since 2022. Annual revenue reached $500 million in 2024 and grew to approximately $650 million in annualized terms by September 2025.
For a financial services company, profitability is more straightforward to achieve than for pure SaaS companies because the revenue model includes interest income from customer deposits, which is substantial and recurring without requiring proportional growth in headcount. As Mercury accumulated deposits, the interest income earned on those deposits grew with the deposit base. Higher interest rates in 2022 and 2023 amplified this dynamic significantly: the deposits that Mercury was holding at partner banks were earning meaningfully higher yields, which flowed through to Mercury’s revenue without requiring additional customer acquisition.
The relationship between deposit growth and profitability created a specific incentive structure. Mercury’s interests were directly aligned with its customers staying on the platform and keeping their money there. Unlike a corporate card company where revenue is primarily interchange, or a SaaS company where revenue is subscription, Mercury’s core revenue grew with the depth of customer relationship. A company that moved its operating account, its savings, its treasury management, and its team cards to Mercury generated substantially more interest income than a company that just opened a checking account.
This alignment shaped Mercury’s product strategy: every feature was designed to make Mercury more useful for managing more of a startup’s financial life, not to capture a share of a specific transaction category.
March 2023: Five Days That Changed Everything
On March 10, 2023, Silicon Valley Bank failed. The bank that had dominated startup banking for forty years, that held deposits for approximately half of all US venture-backed startups, that had been described as an 800-pound gorilla in Akhund’s own words, collapsed over a weekend.
Mercury’s first days after SVB’s collapse were described by Akhund as the craziest period in the company’s history. Founders were messaging him directly. Every question had urgency that didn’t exist in normal times. “I need a bank account now” was the phrase Akhund kept hearing. He spent most of the first few days personally on calls and responding to direct messages from existing and potential customers.
In the five days following SVB’s collapse, Mercury received more than $2 billion in new deposits from over 8,700 new customers. During the first two days of that rush, Mercury processed more new signups than it normally would in an entire week. Approximately 20% of SVB’s former customers opened new accounts at Mercury.
The speed with which Mercury was able to absorb this volume was a product decision that had been made years earlier. The sponsor bank model, combined with the automated self-serve onboarding that Mercury had built from day one, meant there was no bottleneck of relationship managers or branch visits standing between a stressed founder and a functioning bank account. A startup could apply online, get approved in minutes, and start receiving transfers immediately. That capability was what the market needed exactly when it needed it.
Mercury’s response in the days after SVB also demonstrated operational quality that built trust rather than eroding it. Within 48 hours, Mercury launched Mercury Vault, which raised the FDIC insurance coverage for accounts from $1 million to $3 million, later expanding to $5 million, using the sweep network across Mercury’s partner banks to spread individual account balances across multiple FDIC-insured accounts. They added Treasury account access through Vanguard’s short-term US government T-bills for customers who wanted exposure to government-backed securities rather than bank deposits.
Six months after SVB’s collapse, Mercury had retained 92% of the customers who had come in during the crisis period, and their deposits had held steady. The customers who came for safety in a panic had found the product good enough to stay for. Akhund cited this retention rate as the metric that validated Mercury’s competitive positioning: attracting customers in an emergency is not hard, keeping them when the emergency has passed requires being genuinely better.
The Cap Table as Distribution Network
One of the underappreciated aspects of Mercury’s growth strategy is how deliberately it used its cap table as a distribution channel.
The Series A cap table with 40 investors, including celebrity investors and prominent founders, generated press coverage and established credibility. But the more durable distribution mechanism was through the founder network itself.
Founders in the startup ecosystem talk constantly about the tools they use. When a founder who is trusted in a community recommends a banking product, it carries more weight than any amount of paid advertising. Mercury’s early investors, including numerous prominent startup founders and investors, were natural champions in the community Mercury was trying to reach. Every time one of them mentioned Mercury to a founder they were advising or investing in, it was an acquisition event that cost Mercury nothing.
The growth created by this network compounded as Mercury’s customer base grew. Once 30% of companies in a startup accounting firm’s portfolio were on Mercury, the firm started recommending Mercury to new clients as the default. Once startups started seeing each other on Mercury, the social proof reinforced the product’s reputation. The platform became known not just as good but as what serious founders used.
Mercury’s product decisions reinforced this network effect. The API that technical founders could use to integrate their banking data with other tools made Mercury more useful and more embedded in technical stacks. Team accounts that let multiple people access and manage banking with proper permissions made Mercury appropriate for companies with finance teams rather than just solo founders. Each expansion of the product’s capability made it useful for more stages of company growth, which meant founders who started on Mercury when they were three people were still on Mercury when they had fifty.
From Bank Account to Financial Operating System
Mercury’s product evolution from 2019 to 2025 follows the same expansion logic that other successful platform companies have used: establish trust with one core product, then expand into adjacent workflows using that trust as the entry point.
The core product in 2019 was checking and savings accounts. Everything else was built on top of that foundation. Venture debt launched in 2022 as Mercury’s first lending product, offering non-dilutive capital to startups at competitive rates. Corporate charge cards launched in September 2022. Treasury management, letting companies put idle cash to work in money market funds and T-bill positions, launched in 2023. Bill pay, expense management, invoice processing, and employee reimbursement tools launched in 2024.
Each product addressed a workflow that Mercury customers were already handling through multiple disconnected tools. Before Mercury had bill pay, founders were paying vendor invoices through their bank’s wire interface, managing expense reports in a separate tool, reconciling their books in their accounting software. Each of these was a separate login, a separate interface, a separate data export. Mercury’s version of each put the workflow inside the same platform as the bank account, which meant one interface, one data source, one login.
The expansion into personal banking in April 2024 followed the same logic applied to the founder as an individual. A startup founder who used Mercury for their company’s finances faced the same fragmentation in their personal financial life: a personal checking account at Chase or Bank of America with a bad interface, a separate savings account, a separate investment account, a separate credit card. Mercury’s personal banking offering was positioned to serve the same founder who used Mercury for their company, providing the same design quality and startup-first philosophy applied to individual financial management.
By November 2025, Mercury served over 200,000 customers and processed $156 billion in annual transaction volume, up 64% year-over-year. Annualized revenue had grown to approximately $650 million. The company had $20 billion in deposits at partner banks generating substantial interest income.
$3.5 Billion and the Profitability That Earned It
The March 2025 Series C valued Mercury at $3.5 billion. The round was led by Sequoia with participation from existing investors Spark Capital, Marathon, Coatue, CRV, and Andreessen Horowitz.
Akhund described the round as “very opportunistic,” the language of a company that could have not raised and been fine. Mercury had been profitable for ten consecutive quarters. Revenue had reached $500 million. The raise was about having capital available to pursue expansion opportunities at speed rather than about survival or sustaining operations.
The comparison to Brex is difficult to avoid in the Mercury story, given that both companies were founded in 2017, both targeted startup banking, both benefited from the SVB collapse, and both were valued at approximately $3.5 billion in early 2025. But the trajectories diverged in ways that matter. Brex raised $1.5 billion total and peaked at a $12.3 billion valuation before being acquired by Capital One for $5.15 billion. Mercury raised $486 million total, never chased the inflated multiple, stayed profitable, and is growing.
The different outcome reflects different choices about what to optimize for. Brex optimized for growth velocity and accepted the capital intensity and dilution that required. Mercury optimized for capital efficiency and stayed profitable even when that meant slower absolute growth. Both choices were defensible. In the 2021 environment, Brex’s approach produced a much higher valuation. In the 2023 to 2025 environment, Mercury’s approach produced a more durable business.
Akhund has been explicit about the philosophy. He has said he doesn’t understand why some companies raise every six to nine months because the progress between rounds is not proportional to the capital raised. He wanted Mercury to earn the right to take capital through demonstrated performance, not to use capital to create the appearance of performance.
What the Mercury Story Is Really About
The Mercury success story is most usefully read as a story about patience applied at multiple scales.
At the idea level: Akhund identified the problem in 2013 and waited four years before starting. He waited not because he lacked conviction but because he was running another company and believed someone else would fix it. When he confirmed that nobody was fixing it at the standard he envisioned, he acted.
At the product level: eighteen months of building before launch, focused on the “minimum delightful product” rather than the minimum viable product. The longer pre-launch period was the source of the product quality that produced the word-of-mouth growth that funded everything after.
At the fundraising level: four years between Series A and Series B, then another four years before the Series C. In a sector where raising large rounds frequently is often treated as evidence of progress, Mercury treated infrequent raising as evidence that the business was working.
At the business model level: profitability as an operating constraint rather than a future state. Mercury was profitable before it was large, which made the company’s growth trajectory independent of external capital availability.
The $1 million transfer in the first week after launch is the moment that best summarizes what Mercury built. One person, with no human interaction, evaluated the product purely through the experience of using it, decided it was trustworthy, and moved a meaningful sum of money. That decision happened because the product was built to be worth trusting.
The product was built to be worth trusting because a founder who had done this four times, who had seen his own companies struggle with banking friction, who had spent three months talking to sixty banks and a hundred founders to understand the landscape before writing code, designed it that way from the beginning.
Immad Akhund waited four years to start Mercury. He spent eighteen months building it before launching it. He ran it for four years on a seed round before taking more capital. He kept it profitable for ten consecutive quarters before raising the Series C.
Four days after launch, someone transferred $1 million in without ever talking to anyone. That was the signal he was looking for. Everything after was building on top of it.
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