Inside Mercury's Founding Story | Co-Founder & CEO Immad Akhund
Jun 9, 2026 · 50:11
Immad Akhund, co-founder and CEO of Mercury, explains how the startup bank captured one in three U.S. startups by launching with product-market fit from day one—a million-dollar deposit arrived within four days from a stranger—and why legacy banks never stood a chance due to their focus on loans, expensive branch structures, and IT rather than engineering teams. Mercury raised $200M at a $5.2B valuation without needing the money, driven by 2.5x growth in Q1 2024 from AI-fueled entrepreneurship. Akhund details building trust as a moat, using small teams and Amazon's working-backwards process to launch AI features like Mercury Insights and Mercury Command, which let users run banking tasks inside AI tools. He dropped all one-on-ones after learning from Jensen Huang's 60 direct reports, favors optimistic curiosity, and angel-invests 250K checks in contrarian areas like space and deep tech.
