Immad Akhund is co-founder and chief executive of Mercury, which gives startups and small businesses bank accounts, cards, bill pay and accounting tools. Born in Pakistan and raised in the UK, he spent years as a founder standing in bank branches to get a wire enabled, and in 2017 he decided to fix the problem himself with Jason Zhang and Max Tagher.
Pakistan, England and Heyzap
He grew up in the UK and started his first company in 2006. His early startups never found product-market fit. Heyzap, which took him to the US and Y Combinator, got there only after several pivots, starting as a mobile ad network and ending as a developer tool for app publishers before its sale. "We spent two years working on every idea we had," he said later. "In hindsight, we clearly did not have product-market fit for a long time."
Ninety Conversations
The Mercury idea came from those Heyzap years. "I'd go to send a wire and it wasn't enabled in my account. So I'd have to spend three hours at a bank branch getting it enabled. It was insane," he said. After a stint as a part-time partner at Y Combinator in 2017, he found nobody had fixed startup banking, even as Stripe and Square took off. He held about 90 conversations with fintech founders, lawyers and investors over four months, and chose to work through sponsor banks over chasing a charter.
The first bank partner failed to deliver what it promised, so the team scrapped it and rebuilt onboarding and payments with a new one, adding six months. He insisted immigrant founders like himself, without a Social Security number or US ID, could open accounts. Shown the product, only two of about 100 founders were enthusiastic.
A Million Dollars on Day Four
Mercury launched in April 2019 with 1,500 sign-ups. Four days in, a stranger opened an account and deposited $1 million without contacting anyone. COVID cut revenue by 60% in March 2020, then usage doubled as e-commerce boomed. When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in March 2023, the 300-person company built Mercury Vault, offering expanded FDIC insurance through partner banks' sweep networks, between a Saturday and a Monday. "The CEO is a leveling function," he has said.
He has made more than 300 angel investments and keeps a public investor profile on Mercury's site. "Doable but hard" is his favourite place to be. The founder who once lost afternoons in bank branches now runs the bank account he wished he had, and Mercury serves more than 200,000 companies.
