Immad Akhund on Building Mercury, AI Agents & Taking On Big Banks

Immad Akhund (0:00)

I was like, you know, this is gonna be a slug. Because I was like, who's gonna trust, you know, this fintech to like store all their money? Within four days, I think, we had someone sign up that I hadn't met that transferred a million dollars to the Mercury Bank account. I think the future, especially at this time, is like really hard to predict, right? Like, I mean, why isn't it a business of zero?

Right, like is the CEO like that?

Eric Newcomer (0:21)

Just go make me money, like, leave me alone, like stop asking me questions. I mean, there's clearly gonna be like lawsuits every direction at some point. Somebody's gonna spend money that they regret, even if it was like their fault, and they're gonna like sue everybody involved and say an agent was involved, like you should have stopped it, right? Like, do you worry about that as a company? Is that a risk?

Immad Akhund (0:41)

Maybe, but I'm guessing the same thing happened when Internet Banking happened.

Eric Newcomer (0:45)

Immad Akhund, CEO of Mercury, thank you so much for joining the Newcomer Podcast.

Immad Akhund (0:50)

Excited to be here.

Eric Newcomer (0:51)

Newcomer, you know, it's, I think I'm safe to say, it's like a three million revenue business, so we run a lot of it on Mercury during the Silicon Valley bank crisis.

We opened a JPMorgan Chase account, you know, to hedge our bets, have both. I'm sure you had to deal with that. And honestly, I think I didn't quite appreciate how awesome Mercury was until I opened the old school banking account. I'm like, oh my God, like, it's hard to get in. It's hard to move money. It's like not as aesthetic, you know, lots, lots of different things. What, I mean, we have some, you know, news. Obviously you have some new product announcements but do you want to start off with like, what was the core insight when you started Mercury in the first place?

Immad Akhund (1:35)

Yeah, it came together in lots of ways. It's actually my fourth company. So I was like pretty, and I sold my previous company and I was like, you know, I want to do something that I could do for 10, 20, 30 years and I wanted it to be like a company that gets more interesting over time. And, you know, my core insights were, you know, number one, I felt like these tools that every single business needs are like really powerful places to build businesses, right? So if you think about like Gusto or Stripe or Slack, right? Like those are like these core things that every business needs. But, you know, in 2017 when I kind of first started Mercury, banking was one of these things that every single business needs, but like the experience sucked, right? Like I would, and I had this like, you know, because I've been an entrepreneur for so long, I was like every single time I had to sign up for a bank account, make a payment, try to get an API from a bank, like all these things, it was just so hard to do.

So that was definitely like a core part of it. I just thought huge market, every single business needs it. It's so painful. No one likes it. No entrepreneur likes it. And yeah, actually, if you think about it, we launched in April 2019, and at the time, I was like, you know, this is going to be a slug. Because I was like, who's going to trust, you know, this fintech to like store all their money. And there's a really large component of trust with Mercury.

So, but yeah, within four days, I think we had someone sign up that I hadn't met, that transferred a million dollars to the Mercury Bank again.

Eric Newcomer (3:02)

What networks did you really lean on in the beginning to get?

Immad Akhund (3:05)

Honestly, it was really organic. I mean, I had a really broad set of investors. I had about 60 investors in my seed round, and it was partly that I was like, hey, if I get a broad set of investors, and recent Horowitz was an investor, we had Elad Gale, a bunch of other well-known entities that would engender trust in us. And I think that did really kick it off, right? All those people tweeted about it and did all this thing, and it got the snowball rolling. But after that, it was very organic and word of mouth. I mean, even today, more than 60% of our customers are organic and word of mouth. Should I roll into this news that we have?