The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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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: Slapping chatbot interfaces onto software is bad product design
“I'm not a fan of just, like, shove a chatbot in front of it as an interface. Like, I think it's easier to, like, have structured data and be able to do things.”
Akhund: A 3% interest rate is ideal for Mercury's business model
“I think the ideal interest rate for us is like something like three percent. I think there's lots of kind of VC funding and, ah, business formation at three percent, ah, but we also have the opportunity to make money on our deposits better at three percent.”
Akhund: Mercury increased valuation from $1.6B to $3.5B
“Our last round was at 1.6 billion valuation. This is 3.5.”
Akhund: Late-Stage Mega-Rounds Still Require Pitching a 100x Vision
“It's like a surprisingly similar process to an earlier round, right? I did this in about four weeks and you know, at least as a founder you really still like pitching the big vision, like how can this be, you know, another hundred X, right?”
Akhund: Mercury grew from 40k to 200k customers and 860 employees
“We had a 140 employees back then. I think we announced we had about 40,000 customers. Now we have 200,000 customers. We're almost 800 and 60 employees.”
Akhund: About 60% of Mercury customers come from organic word of mouth
“More than 50%, about 60% of our customers come through organic word of mouth distribution, and that's not just in the startup space, that's in all of these spaces.”
Akhund: Mercury has been profitable for 10 consecutive quarters
“We've been profitable for 1010 quarters”
Akhund: Mercury raises $300M round led by Sequoia Capital
“We just announcing our CVC Sequoia is leading the round with Park and Marathon coming in as new investors, and all of our previous kind of VCs are participating, so it's a three hundred million round with a combination of primary and secondary.”
Akhund: Mercury LLM-driven signups are growing exponentially from a small base
“We've got a graph of like how number of signups is going with LLMs. And it's like fully exponential, especially in the last two, three months still a small base.”
Akhund: Mercury launched personal banking with a five-person team
“So I think we had a five person team. We, one of the drivers was we found this amazing guy, Alexei who previously had his own kind of startup neobank in the consumer space. And then he helped Albert launch their consumer bank, and then did the same at Mercury.”
Akhund: Sonya Huang led Sequoia's investment in Mercury
“Yeah, Sonya Huang. She's been doing a ton in AI, including Langchain and Glean and she knows a lot about FinTech as well, so excited to have her on board.”
Akhund: Mercury struggled to grow in 2022 after zero-rate boom
“We grew a lot when interest rates were zero, especially during kind of the big, big bubble. And you know, there was definitely like a struggle in terms of growth during like some of that 20, 22 period, but you know, since then it's picked up and we've obviousl…”
Bench co-founder sold subsequent accounting startup to Mercury
“He goes and starts like some other accounting related business with all the experience that he had. Then has a nice exit to Mercury, and now he works on there. Started and had a successful exit. Now he runs their, like, accounting product to Mercury.”