- Valuation Model
- Expert Interviews
- Founders, funding
How has Mercury diversified its customer base, and will the company focus on both the startup ecosystem and other customer segments such as VCs?
Immad Akhund
Founder & CEO of Mercury
I think it's really important to understand who you're serving and be quite deliberate about it.
When we were launched, if you raised a million dollars, it was hard to get an SVB bank account. You could hardly even go to the website and just sign up. You'd have to jump through some hoops. If your VC introduced you, they'd give you a bank account straight away, but they didn't really want small companies.
We are definitely more diversified than SVB, serving small startups, bootstrapped companies, and those that aren't venture-backed.
We've also had a ton of growth in e-commerce. That's our second-biggest segment. Our third-biggest segment is consultants. They tend to be adjacent to tech, but freelancers, design agencies, marketing agencies, all of those kinds of businesses.
Our fourth-biggest segment is investors, which is about 5% percent of our customers. Any US business can sign up, but we do think about building products, marketing and distribution towards those segments specifically.
As to your last question, there's definitely been a big push from the VC community to say, "Hey, what about us?" Actually, a lot of the things that make big banks annoying are especially annoying to VCs. VCs involve a lot of money moving in and out. Your LP will fund a $5 million capital call and then you'll send out $5 million to make an investment. It's very easy to understand the behavior if you understand investors. You're like, "Okay, that's exactly what I would expect from this bank account."
If you're a big bank and you have a few investors, every time one of these wires comes in, they'll be like, "Flag that account, flag that account." It's not a very pleasant experience.
Obviously, if you're a very, very big VC fund and you've got some private wealth management type of thing, you'll still have an okay experience, but there's definitely a pretty large set of funds that wouldn't.
