Immad Akhund
Co-founder & CEO, Mercury · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
28statements → 12claims → 3claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.82/5average certainty → 1.54/5average debate potential → 2said about them ↓
3 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 9 not checkable as stated how the 12 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
12 assertions · 1 opinion · 10 insights · 4 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 12 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 9 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Immad argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
Everything Immad Akhund said on A Product Market Fit Show that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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: 2018 Was the First Year BaaS Made Seed Fintech Launches Viable
“Probably 18 was like the first year where there was like a few of these services that you could actually get live with and you didn't have to go, because before then what used to happen is you'd have to go find a bank”
Akhund: Building a fintech with money movement is 3x harder than software
“I would say to do a fintech company in general, especially one that has like any sort of payments like money movement it's probably three times harder than a software company. Like a software company, you can probably launch at three months, a payment slash ba…”
Akhund: Mercury avoided an overcrowded neobank market by launching in 2019
“If we hadn't launched in 2019 and built up like a little bit of a lead, it would have been probably like an overly competitive space by 2020, 20, 21.”
Akhund: Rappi founders never spoke to him again after his investment
“I made this investment in this company called Rappi which is a doordash for Latam, and it's done really well. Nice, nice, nice. Honestly, I invested and they never talk to me again.”
Akhund: Y Combinator is truly transformational because it invests when others do not
“I mean, there are some things like Y Cominator that like are truly transformational. Like they, you know, they make an investment when other people are not, or like they come up with a model that's different.”
Akhund: Fintech founders can gain free market intelligence from brief lawyer calls
“Lawyers are pretty useful. They're smart. They know the law, but B they actually like also know people like they know companies that have done this or tried to do this and who have they partnered with. If you think about it, a lawyer is often you know, working…”
Akhund: Fintech founders can easily reach bank partnership heads through networks
“Whether you work with lawyers or other fintech entrepreneurs, like you can normally get to the partnership people at these places. So getting like an actual like test term sheet, not that hard.”
Akhund: a16z offered Mercury a seed term sheet same-day pre-product
“We met on the Tuesday, they gave me a turn shoot on the Tuesday. So it was done. But I mean, they moved quickly and I appreciated that and like they really you know, who knows whether I would have got any other VC, but like they really did believe in, in the m…”
Akhund: Chime focuses primarily on underbanked and subprime consumers
“They were, and I would say they still are focused on kind of underbanked consumers, like people who don't have bank accounts, and they're well, they're like, yeah subprime kind of consumers.”
Akhund: Startup execution slows significantly once teams exceed 16 people
“I've also found that more than, probably around, like, the number 16 things slow down quite a bit. Like, you need, with, like, eight people in a room, like, you don't really need management. It's like, everyone knows what everyone's doing. Everyone's doing, yo…”
Akhund: Traditional banks require manual wire calls due to weak security
“A lot of the reasons that wires are like that is because banks don't have, like, true TOTP authentication, right? Like, when you, I mean, nowadays, I guess they mostly have SMS kind of verification, but that's very easy to, you know, steal someone's phone numb…”
Akhund: Defining culture at 20 employees is too late for startups
“If we were at 20 people and then we tried to write the culture, then like, it's hard to have a cohesive culture when you haven't tried to build a cohesive culture.”
Akhund: Operating a business naturally reveals constant B2B startup ideas
“If you're running a business, you're just like, there's so many problems in running a business that you just see ideas everywhere. Like if you're an engineer, you see developer tool ideas everywhere.”
Akhund: Slack, Stripe, and Gusto succeeded by applying consumer UX to enterprise
“There was a lot of ideas came out, which were just like taking consumer grade product and design and applying it to just like the Slack kind of thing. The Slack, Stripe, Gusto, et cetera.”
Akhund: Mercury secured three sponsor bank term sheets before VC fundraising
“The Deliverables or the items that I had before, you know, I did a fundraise was, you know, I had some, I worked with a designer and I had, like, some rough initial designs of, like, what it might look like, and I had, like, three, either sponsor banks or bass…”
Akhund landed 30 bank meetings by cold-emailing Money 20/20 attendees
“I went to this conference, Money, 2020, which is, like, the biggest FinTech conference and I basically got the full list of attendance, and I, you know, scrapes and stuff, and I found, like, the 60 people who were going that had that were, like, from a bank, a…”
Akhund: No U.S. startup or SMB neobank operated at scale before Mercury
“Yeah, I think the, there was one company that tried a little bit called Seed that was doing kind of SMB banking, but at that point that kind of faltered but yeah, nothing at scale for sure.”
Akhund: Mercury grew 30% to 40% monthly during its first year
“And we grew kind of 30 to 40% a month for the first 12 months.”
Akhund: Mercury intentionally added 60 seed investors to drive distribution
“We had 60 investors in our seed round. So I, you know, I deliberately, you know, we had recent Horowitz as a lead, and then as soon as they kind of committed, which is relatively early, I deliberately went and like Hunted people that had like a large portfolio…”
Mercury wanted to do Y Combinator but the deal fell through
“I kind of wanted to do it for Mercury as well. It didn't work out”
Akhund: About 75% of Mercury Customers Join Within Six Months of Incorporation
“Nowadays about 75% of our customers are within, with Probably their first bank account within six months of incorporating.”
Akhund outlines Mercury's dual monetization model
“The two, two main ways is, number one, people use our debit card or credit card, and we make money on the interchange, so every time you swipe, there's a fee, and as the issuer, you get, like, a pretty big chunk of the fee and then number two, we, you know, if…”
The other half of the tape: Immad Akhund's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode on A Product Market Fit Show. every mention, with the transcript →
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Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| How Mercury Hit $500M ARR—then raised $300M from Sequoia at $3.5B. | Immad Akhund, CEO & F | Jul 21, 2025 | 41m |