Immad Akhund
Co-founder & CEO, Mercury. On 4 shows, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@immad ↗LinkedIn ↗mercury.com ↗
Immad Akhund is the co-founder and CEO of Mercury, a fintech platform providing banking services and financial software to startups. Prior to Mercury, he co-founded Heyzap and has backed hundreds of startups as an angel investor.
4shows
5appearances
129statements
15resolved
10supported
1contradicted
67%fully supported
7said about them ↓ Everything Immad Akhund said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Akhund: If you get a massive valuation, raise big but don't spend
“I think the mistake is to not raise enough money. Like every now and then someone gets like a, you know, like a million dollar valuation, they raised like fifty million. I think that's a mistake. Like you want to raise enough money at that high valuation. And …”
Akhund: I passed on Scale AI because the founders were too young
“I saw scale AI and I was like, okay, you know, like good idea, but these people are so young. I think they were like 19 and 20 at the time or something. I was like, yeah, this is like, I was like, I think I could run this company better if I was doing it and I…”
Akhund: AI labor-replacement software margins will collapse under market competition
“So yeah, the sell that like VCs get and entrepreneurs are making is, oh, we're replacing your labor costs. Therefore, we should charge a third of that. But the reality is, once you have a competitive market dynamic, like, the actual margins are going to compre…”
Akhund: Avoiding AI Investments as the Sector Is Overhyped and Overvalued
“And, you know, I've ended up especially recently avoiding AI. I think AI is overhyped and overvalued.”
Akhund: Mercury raised Series B at irrational 120x multiple, would do again
“You know, we did our series B at a 120 X, which was not rational. This is 20, 21, but we did it and I would do it again.”
Akhund: At current seed valuations, investors must hunt for decacorns, not unicorns
“What we're really doing as seed investors is unicorn hunting, or I would say even, like, at these current evaluations, like, you're hunting for decacorns, and that doesn't, yeah, even if you're great at picking and you have a great network, et cetera you're no…”
Akhund: Airtable can reach a $50 billion valuation within 15 years
“I'm in it for the game as it was, and I do think, you know, these kind of compounders like Airtable you know, like there's companies I'm in where I'm like, okay, I can see this being a fifty billion dollar company, and if I just stick with it for, you know, ma…”
Akhund: Mercury will employ more software engineers in five years despite AI
“I think we'll have more. Like, I think the maybe I'm contrarian about it a little bit, but to me, if my engineers get more productive, I'm gonna come up with more things to do. Like, I'm gonna have, like, so much stuff that I want to do.”
Akhund claims most seed-stage AI startups lack real traction
“The vast majority of AI at seed out there does not have traction.”
Akhund: Multi-stage venture capital funds will inevitably go public
“It seems inevitable that a few of these multi-stage funds will IPO and be public companies, right? Like we had some stuff about GC doing it. Yeah. I think that's just going to happen.”
Akhund: AI coding tools struggle on large, interconnected codebases
“Engineering productivity. I haven't seen as much of a boost as I would like to see. I think it's really good for making an app from scratch. When you have a huge code base with, that's all interlinked, it's just not as good. And we also built in like a weird p…”
Akhund: Startups competing with incumbents must catch up and be 10x better
“We were very deliberately serving a set of people that had alternatives. So and then the bar is just much higher. You have to catch up with everything that exists, and you have to be 10 X better than that.”
Akhund: Founders should reject 'always be raising' because it distracts from building
“I'm like, so out on that statement. I just think it's partly because I don't like fundraising at all. And it's partly because, you know, fundraising is not the objective. It's distracting. There's so much to do at a startup.”
Akhund: Great founders succeed regardless of any investor input
“If you're a good company with a good founder, you're probably gonna raise money from someone else, if not me and you'll probably be successful regardless of any investor input.”
Akhund: Startups with known feature roadmaps should build before acquiring users
“I've also found that if you don't build a thing up front, it's often actually hard to build it after you launch. This is, like, pretty contrarian, but just when you have users and, like, Yeah. You have to worry about things breaking and like fixing bugs and et…”
Akhund: Dedicated fintech funds refused to invest in Mercury's seed round
“Even after Andreessen had come in with a lead check, it was so hard to get any fintech fund to invest alongside them because all fintech funds saw was like all the problems. They were like, this doesn't work for this reason and that reason. And I was like, I r…”
Akhund: Seed investments in unicorns can return as low as 8x
“If your entry price is like, 20, 25 mil you know, after you get that dilution you know, unicorn, like, sometimes it's like, I've seen as low as, like, eight X return from, like, a seed stage investment to unicorn”
Mercury Credit Card Outpaces Competitors Among Own Customer Base
“Now Mercury for Mercury customers, Mercury credit card is bigger than all the other kind of corporate credit cards on the platform”
Akhund: Space tech currently has only three functional markets
“There's, like, basically three existing markets in space tech. There's rockets, right? Like, getting things up and down, which obviously SpaceX dominates. There's taking pictures from space and That's actually, like, pretty big market, like, forty billion doll…”
Akhund: Founders still allocate me $150k after hotshot VCs close the round
“I've done rounds recently where the round is fully done with, like, some hotshot VC, and then I still get my one 50 K, and after the round is fully done so winning is, like, Easy right now.”
Akhund: 100% of Mercury's first 30 alpha customers were my angel investments
“You know, actually like the, from the first 30 kind of alpha customers in Mercury, I think a hundred percent of them were like companies I'd invested in.”
Akhund: Mid-sized venture funds will struggle while small and mega funds thrive
“The people like me that are investing kind of smaller checks, like we'll do fine and the multistage ones will do fine. I don't know what happens in the middle. I think the middle will have more of an issue.”
The other half of the tape: Immad Akhund's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 6 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 3Jordi Hays 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 3
A Product Market Fit Show 2
TBPN 2
2025 5 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- WebSummit Panel w/ Founders of Glean ($5B) and Huntress ($2B): What it takes to hit $100M ARR · PMF Show
- Weekly Recap: The Soham Parekh Drama, Meta Attacks OpenAI, Trump's Mega Bill
- Soham Parekh Breaks His Silence (First Interview)
- 20VC: Four Traits of the Most Successful Founders | How to Hunt and Close Talent Like a Pro and Where All Founders Go Wrong | Lessons Raising $397M From the Best Investors in the World with Eléonore Crespo @ Pigment
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Immad's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Mercury | 2 | 62 | 50% 3/6 | full record on 20VC → |
| PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Mercury | 1 | 28 | 100% 3/3 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |
| TBPNLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Mercury | 1 | 21 | 80% 4/5 | full record on TBPN → |
 a16zLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Mercury | 1 | 18 | 0% 0/1 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |