01:25:18 · Jordi Hays, Tae Kim, John Coogan
[01:25:18] S1: Super Bowl? Is it more like a Super Bowl or like a No. [01:25:21] S3: I I wish like we should bring back those bar crawls like Yeah. They had it they did it once. Okay. And then it stopped. Like, we should bring that back. [01:25:29] S1: Too much of a top signal. [01:25:30] S3: Is gonna be the number one most valuable company for a long time. Yeah. Like, sorry, AlphaFit. It's not gonna happen. [01:25:36] S0: Yeah. [01:25:38] S3: So we should bring those those bar earnings parties back. [01:25:41] S0: That sounds great. Well, we will talk to you soon. Have a great day. [01:25:44] S1: See you. Alright. [01:25:45] S3: Thanks, guys. Good to [01:25:45] S1: see Before you
01:25:45 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Immad Akhund, Marcus Milione
[01:25:45] S1: see Before you [01:25:46] S0: we bring in our next guest, I wanna actually pull up this Wall Street Journal article, see how SpaceX is about to eclipse every other blockbuster IPO. Scroll down on this because they have a beautiful visualization of IPOs over time. You can see the first graph. The these are IPOs over the last seven years ranging from $0 raised, probably $10,000,000 $100,000,000 all the way up to $2,000,000,000 Continue to scroll down, and you'll see what happens as the blockbuster IPO starts stacking up. You get Airbnb, who we're talking to the founder of just in a few minutes, ARM, Cerebras, Uber and Porsche. And then as you keep going, Saudi Aramco comes in at $25,000,000,000 if you keep scrolling down. And then eventually, SpaceX comes in to dwarf them all at 80,000,000,000 to make everything else look like a flat line on the chart. Absolutely blockbuster IPO and should make for a ton of great takes and analysis, and it'll be a fun fun day on the timeline when SpaceX goes goes public soon. We're getting the s one any day now. Well, our next guest, Ahmad from Mercury, is here with a big funding announcement. So we'll bring him in from the waiting room into the TVP and I'll throw it the mod. How are you doing? Here he is. [01:27:04] S5: Yeah. Great to be here. Am I not gonna get the dong? [01:27:07] S0: Oh, you'll get the dong, but you gotta give us the news. Tell us what happened. [01:27:10] S1: Be patient. You gotta give [01:27:11] S4: us what happened. Alright. [01:27:12] S5: Juffy Jaw. There we go. [01:27:13] S0: How much did you raise?
01:27:13 · John Coogan, Immad Akhund, S2
[01:27:13] S0: How much did you raise? [01:27:15] S5: Yeah. We just raised 200,000,000. Wow. $550,000,000. There we go. TCV is leading. So excited about the announcement today. [01:27:25] S0: That's fantastic. What it was the traction that unlocked this new fundraising round? What was the catalyst? [01:27:31] S5: You know, we've just been kinda grinding away for the last what is it? Seven years since we launched. [01:27:37] S2: Super Night success. [01:27:39] S5: Seen a lot of growth in q one, especially about 2.5 x our q one last year in terms of applications. I don't know if you've seen the stats, but there's been a lot of new business formation. Yeah. A lot of, you know, companies being built using AI. So obviously, we we hear about, like, these big startups in AI, but there's also just like normal businesses being built with AI being a big catalyst. And we saw, yeah, big increase, 2.5 x over last year, which and last year was a big year for us. [01:28:07] S0: How are you reaching those customers? Like, are the key funnels that draw in these new businesses? You know, the other it's hard to reach out to them before you have to be very aware.
01:28:07 · John Coogan, Immad Akhund, Jordi Hays
[01:28:07] S0: How are you reaching those customers? Like, are the key funnels that draw in these new businesses? You know, the other it's hard to reach out to them before you have to be very aware. [01:28:16] S5: The other crazy thing for us is we most of our growth is organic, but that even the percentage organic has been growing for us. Even though we're growing, we're getting more and more organic, which, you know, is unexpected. And the other big channel for us is LLM recommendations. So if, you know, you go into Yeah. Your favorite LLM and you say, you know, what bank should I use for my startup? Mercury is often the recommendation. [01:28:40] S0: There you go. [01:28:40] S5: That's the yeah. We try to deliver the best customer experience possible and, you know, because people really love Mercury, they tell their friends about it and that's Yeah. [01:28:47] S1: Like a nice idea for us. What what is is like 90% of the reason that you guys are recommended so highly by LM's is just because people recommend Mercury Like, so I I I can't be I I I I'm just trying to get at is it like your team was like, hey, we should really optimize this or it was just [01:29:07] S5: think it's really hard. Like, there's a whole thing called GEO which is like all about optimizing for LLMs. But at the end of the day, you know, if it's on Reddit, it's on X, like, if all the content is recommending Mercury, then that feeds into the algorithm.
01:29:07 · Immad Akhund, John Coogan, Tae Kim
[01:29:07] S5: think it's really hard. Like, there's a whole thing called GEO which is like all about optimizing for LLMs. But at the end of the day, you know, if it's on Reddit, it's on X, like, if all the content is recommending Mercury, then that feeds into the algorithm. [01:29:18] S0: Yeah. It helps to have been doing press for years. There's a huge advantage to being in business seven years. Not so long that you're the the articles are about the downfall or like the the how you're a dinosaur. All the coverage is that it's new and interesting and valuable and worth checking out and so that services. How are you thinking about going deeper in those LLM recommendations and sort of like the agentic commerce of actually opening an account? Is that something that's on your horizon to integrate that? [01:29:50] S3: So kind
01:29:50 · Tae Kim, Immad Akhund, John Coogan
[01:29:50] S3: So kind [01:29:50] S5: of interesting thinking about, like, the LLMs using Mercury. So we actually launched Mercury CLI. Sure. We launched that was a month or so ago, we launched an MCP actually in December. Yeah. And our growth on, like, those is, like, through the roof. So in terms of people are using Claude Code or Cowork or ChatGPT to connect to Mercury and then, you know, I think the well, not for everyone, but for a lot of people, they've kind of running their whole business and their life in AI now. And, you know, if you can pull in creating an invoice or like approving a payment and it's all done within your an existing workflows, that's really powerful. And I think if you there's a flywheel between like if you build great tools that AI can use, it actually recommends those tools even more. I mean, that's partly why like, you know, people like Superbase and Yeah. Like those kind of tools [01:30:36] S0: that run with. How do you how do you deal with the tension of, like, you could build a dashboard visualizing payments that are made into a bank account over a period of time. You could also expose an API that allows me to suck out all the data and vibe code my own dashboard the way I like it. There's probably demand for both. Do you just have to do both? Do you pick a lane?