The first bank account UpRound ever opened was a Mercury account. We were customers first and investors second, and Mercury is our latest UpRound portfolio company.
The first thing you notice about Mercury is that it does not feel like a traditional bank. You sign up in minutes, not days. There are no branch visits, no faxed forms, no relationship manager to schedule around. The interface is clean in a way that startup founders recognize instantly, because it was built by people who had felt the pain of every other business bank account they had ever opened.
That was the entire point. Design, features and onboarding is their competitive advantage.
Immad Akhund had the idea back in 2013, watching Stripe and Gusto and Rippling make startup tooling feel modern while banking stayed stuck in 2006. He waited years to build it, assuming someone else would. Nobody did. When Mercury finally launched in 2019, the team had spent eighteen months on what Akhund called a minimum delightful product, refusing to ship the half-finished MVP that a lesser team would have. Domestic and international wires, multi-user permissions, a clean UI, real support for immigrant founders, all working on day one. In the first week of the private alpha, one customer wired in a million dollars. The product grew 30 to 40% month over month from there.
This is the part worth sitting with. Mercury did not win on financial engineering. It won because it was the best-designed product in a category nobody had bothered to design for. The banking underneath was rented. Deposits landed at partner banks, the licenses belonged to someone else, and Mercury built the layer founders actually touched. For years that was enough, because the experience was the product and the experience was excellent.
Then the ground shifted. Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in March 2023, and half a generation of founders learned in a weekend that their bank was a single point of failure. In six days Mercury added more than two billion dollars in deposits and thousands of customers. Roughly one in five former SVB customers opened an account. The interface that had been winning founders one at a time suddenly won them by the thousand. Mercury crossed 300,000 customers, took one in three U.S. startups, and hit $650 million in annualized revenue while staying profitable, which it has been since 2022.
A great login screen had become critical infrastructure. And critical infrastructure cannot stay a tenant forever.That is what the charter is. In December 2025 Mercury applied to the OCC for a national bank charter and to the FDIC for deposit insurance. In April 2026 it received conditional approval to establish Mercury Bank, N.A. It hired Jon Auxier to run it, a man who was CFO of SoFi Bank and helped take SoFi's own charter across the line. This is not a company dabbling. It is a company that has decided to own the thing it has been renting.
The logic is clean. A chartered Mercury stops sharing deposit yield with Column and Choice and keeps more of the roughly twenty billion dollars it already holds. It can control its own payment rails and expand lending without asking a partner bank for permission. Akhund has been direct about why. Customers kept asking for real lending and for payment infrastructure Mercury could actually control, and none of it was possible without a charter. The products founders wanted were on the other side of a license Mercury did not have.
The charter also answers the oldest question hanging over the company. For years the knock on Mercury was graduation risk. Startups would outgrow the pretty interface and defect to JPMorgan the moment they needed real lending and institutional services. A chartered bank with its own balance sheet, expanded lending, and deeper treasury is exactly how you keep the customer who is graduating. Mercury is not just adding a license. It is closing the exit its critics kept pointing at.
The market read it the same way. In May 2026 Mercury raised $200 million in a Series D led by TCV at a $5.2 billion valuation, up 49% from fourteen months earlier, with Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, CRV, Sapphire, Sequoia, and Spark all back in. The detail I keep returning to is that Akhund said the company is profitable, has been for four years, and has no plan to raise again. A business that does not need capital took nine figures anyway, right after clearing the regulatory gate that unlocks the next decade. That is not desperation. That is a company buying the runway to finish becoming what it already functions as.
There is one honest caveat, and it is the same one every bank-in-formation carries. Conditional approval is not a charter. Mercury is still in the bank organization phase, working toward final authorization from the OCC and pending sign-off from the FDIC and the Federal Reserve, with full chartering targeted for 2027. Bank formation runs on a regulatory calendar that does not care how fast you grow or how good your NPS is, and Mercury's is above 80 against an industry average in the thirties. The company is excellent. The license is not finished. Both things are true, and only one of them is still in question.
But the direction is set and the arc is coherent. Mercury started as a better way to open an account and grew into the place where hundreds of thousands of companies keep their money. The interface won the founders. The charter is how it keeps them. The company that got its start by not being a bank is, on purpose and from a position of strength, finally becoming one.
Mercury did not pivot. It grew into what it always was.
Bashar Aboudaoud
Managing Member, UpRound
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