Banking FinTech Mercury announced it raised $200 million in a funding round that valued the company at $5.2 billion.
The company’s Series D round comes as Mercury is making a push into the traditional banking sector, while also preparing a product that lets users complete financial work using artificial intelligence (AI), according to a Wednesday (May 20) news release.
“AI is collapsing the friction between an idea and a company faster than anything I have seen in my career,” Mercury Co-founder and CEO Immad Akhund said in the release.
“We are going to see more founders in the next five years than in the last twenty. But legacy banking in 2026 still works the way it did when I started my first company in 2006. I started Mercury because banking should do more than be a vault, it should help customers run the best business possible.”
According to the release, Mercury has more than 300,000 customers, including 1 in 3 American startups. Though the company was built for tech startups, it says nearly three-quarters of its new customers are from outside the AI and tech space.
In the last year, the company has debuted Mercury Insights, its “first in-product AI tool,” which offers customers interactive, real-time views of their company finances. It also acquired AI payroll company Central and expanded its personal finance tool Mercury Personal to applicants in the U.S. And later this year, it will debut Mercury Command, a financial work platform.
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“Instead of searching for what you need, you simply tell Mercury what you need and it happens: check your cash position, change your auto-transfer rules, categorize transactions, send an invoice, all in natural language and without leaving your account,” the release said.
Mercury announced late last month it had landed conditional approval for a national banking charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).
“We applied for this charter because the best founders in the country deserve a bank that was built for them,” Akhund said at the time.
“Our customers have been asking for Zelle, for expanded lending, for payment infrastructure we actually control. We couldn’t give them those things without a bank charter. Those gaps have always bothered me. This is how we start closing them.”
The company is part of a larger group of FinTechs petitioning the OCC for banking charters, a trend PYMNTS examined earlier this year.
“Traditionally, FinTech companies have built around banks, not as banks,” that report said. “The strategy was simple: partner for access to payments rails, deposit insurance and compliance infrastructure; don’t built it from the ground up yourself.”