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?
01:31:00 · Immad Akhund
[01:31:00] S5: I I think for us it's like do both. So we're building both kind of the CLI and we we have a whole team that's improving all the features available via the API and Yeah. Those those services. But we also have another team that's working on and we just launched Mercury Insights which, know, summarizes your transactions, gives you like kind of AI insights on end, lets you talk to your transactions. Then later this year, we're launching Mercury Command where you can do kind of complex workflows like, hey, I just hired someone, set them up in payroll and create a card and do all of that without me having to kind of click around all the kind of mercury surfaces. And I think number one, I don't know exactly where the world is going to go. Right? Like, maybe maybe everyone is going to be using AI assistance to do everything or it's going to be a combination. So we want to service both of it. And b, you know, if you think about like the gap between us and kind of these incumbent banks, yeah, even whether it's like a mobile app or like searching for all your transactions, whatever it is, you know, Mercury has been far ahead. But if AI keeps changing the world and, like, you know, the people's expectation of interfaces and things like that changes, we want to be at the forefront of that and, you know, that's gonna increase the spread between, like, what people get from Mercury versus, like, what they get from the incumbents.
01:32:12 · John Coogan, Immad Akhund, Jordi Hays
[01:32:12] S0: Yeah. I was reading an article in The Economist a couple weeks ago about stablecoins going through a boom last year and then going through a bit of a winter or like a maybe just a, you know, stable volumes through the earlier part of this year. What are you seeing in terms of demand or tickets or usage of stablecoin related features in fintech broadly? [01:32:38] S5: Yeah. I think it's a lot more important on like a global basis. Mhmm. I think if you're in The US and you're sending money to a US business or you can US consumer, you know, why is ACH all of the cards, all of that works pretty smoothly. Yeah. If you're paying money internationally or, you know, you don't you're in The US and you want to have like a stable currency Mhmm. That's where USDC and these other stablecoins are doing really well. So, you know, we don't currently support it natively, but lots of our customers use, you some know, of these kind of Stablecoin services. And we'll probably have kind of at least payment features that are based on Stablecoin, especially for those kind of international payments where it is particularly useful. So I don't necessarily see it as a replacement for The US banking system in The US. I think it's it's more of like this kind of global connectivity layer. [01:33:23] S0: Is oh, sorry, George. [01:33:24] S1: Why why was this year the right time to get into payroll?