Like Paystone founder Tarique Al Ansari and Paysend founder Adbul Abdulkerimov, Immad Akhund works to expand financial technology. The computer scientist and repeat entrepreneur founded Mercury to make banking easier and more efficient for technology startups.
“In the future, [banks] will have to be technology companies,” Akhund told the Dealmakers podcast. “Banking is one of the few things where technology companies are not dominant, even though it’s basically dealing with [background intelligent transfer service].”
“One of our aims is to give everyone products that were only accessible to bigger companies,” he said.
Immad Akhund launched three successful tech startups
Akhund co-founded and became CTO of his first startup Clickpass in 2007. He remained with the OpenID tech company until he launched Heyzap the following year.
“I think it was a great learning experience for me,” Akhund said about his first startup. “I spent a lot of time networking, meeting a lot of other great entrepreneurs in the UK, seeing how they were doing it, and even though it didn’t work out, it was actually a fun experience for me where I felt like this was what I wanted to do in the future.”
In 2008, he became co-founder and CEO of Heyzap. The tech startup started as a social network for gamers before gaming became mobile. Eventually, Heyzap found success as an ad monetization company for mobile game developers. The mobile advertising technology company Fyber acquired Heyzap in 2016 for $45 million.
“[Heyzap] was very successful in the iOS store all through 2015, like maybe three or four of the Top Ten Apps games were using it,” he said.
Before launching Mercury in 2017, Akhund was a part-time partner with the United States-based seed funding investment firm Y Combinator.
“I always say I was very lucky to have Y Combinator. It is a nice stepping stone into moving to Silicon Valley and San Francisco…it was a real enabler for [Mercury],” said Akhund.
Immad Akhund becomes a computer scientist
Akhund was born in Pakistan. He then immigrated to the United Kingdom with his parents at nine years old.
“I think, like a lot of immigrants, my family wanted to give us the best opportunities.” Akhund reflected. “Whether it’s education or job opportunities that the UK just had and still has a lot more than Pakistan.”
During childhood, Akhund loved to play on his father’s old-school Apple computer. “Like a lot of kids, the first exposure is through games…One of the other things that gave me extra exposure was I was always interested in making a little more money on the side…We made little websites and tried to drive traffic to it, and all that kind of stuff,” Akhund recalled.
In 2006, Akhund earned his Master of Arts in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge.
“That decision was definitely formative and being able to have this very unique skill that I could apply to entrepreneurship,” Akhund said about pursuing computer science.
Before earning his Master’s in 2006, Akhund was a software developer. He worked for the tech firm Aquila and briefly for Bloomberg prior to starting Clickpass.
Immad Akhund founds Mercury for tech startups
Akhund founded the San Francisco-based startup in August 2017. The company raised a seed round of $6 million. In 2019, Mercury received $20 million in Series A funding from nearly 100 investors.
Mercury’s features are designed specifically for startup companies. The startup solves experiences Akhund had with banks while running Heyzap.
“As an entrepreneur, I felt the pain of dealing with incumbent banks,” Akhund explained. “I was very frustrated with the lack of basics like transparency in customer service, and also felt like they didn’t launch any new tools to progress.”
In the traditional bank space, there’s a tendency to skip out on a lot of features, so many banks give you a debit card, but they don’t give you the wires and check deposits,” said Akhund. “Another part is how we think about fraud and compliance. If someone receives $5M in funding from a VC, that is very expected, whereas in the regular non-startup contract, receiving $5M will be reviewed with suspicion.”
“We offer business checking accounts, savings accounts, and a debit card,” Akhund said. “All features are available online, and we also support foreign founders. We are trying to build tools to help you run your business, so we have an [application programming interface] and are adding other analytical tools.”
Learn more about Mercury’s technology and services on their website.
