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Why I built banking for America's startups — then rebuilt it around AI

Immad Akhund, Co-Founder & CEO at Mercury, joins NEW ECONOMIES on banking one in three U.S. startups, raising $200M without needing a dollar of it, and why the legacy banking system was never going to win.

In this episode, we discuss Mercury’s origin story — launched in 2019 when the entire industry told founders that nobody would trust a startup with their money — and how a million-dollar deposit arrived within four days of launch from someone Immad had never spoken to. We dig into why incumbent banks were always going to lose this fight, why AI makes their position ten times worse, and how Mercury is now rebuilding its entire product around the idea that your bank should live inside whatever AI tool you already use.We also explore why Immad dropped all one-on-ones after watching Jensen Huang run NVIDIA with 60 direct reports, the Amazon “working backwards” process that mapped out Mercury’s entire AI roadmap from a single doc, and why the fintech companies that planted seeds in 2017 are only now bearing fruit.

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Timestamps

(0:00) Immad Akhund(2:35) Why Raise $200M?(3:55) Why FinTech Is Having a Moment(6:02) How Has AI Impacted Mercury?(10:25) What Is Defensibility Today?(13:29) Mercury Finding Product-Market Fit(15:22) Legacy Banks Never Caught Up(19:22) Inside Mercury's Product Team(23:56) The Nuclear Power of Talent(26:05) Is AI Moving Too Fast?(29:00) Keeping Up-to-Date with AI(31:20) Ollie Joining Immad as Chief of Staff(33:45) Our Latest Product Features(35:45) Immad's Interest in Angel Investing(38:20) Today's Underappreciated Opportunities(40:36) AI Wrappers: Will They Last?(42:34) Why Is Consumer So Hard?(44:17