Why Mercury's CEO isn't afraid of giving his product to AI
Immad Akhund joins us this week on the podcast. Also: Apple's vibe coding crackdown, Cursor drama, Jensen's tokenmaxxing, and more.
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“I don’t think Claude is going to go build a bank”
Every software CEO right now is wrestling with the same question: how much of your product do you give over to AI? On this week’s episode of ACCESS, we put the question to Mercury CEO Immad Akhund. His answer: “I don’t think Claude is going to go build a bank.” At the same time, he said, “If you try to fight the future, I think you’re going to lose out on the opportunity.”
Mercury has an MCP connector that lets you pipe your banking data into an AI model for tax planning, financial modeling, or whatever you want. It also just launched a product called Insights that builds AI chat directly into its interface. Immad’s argument is that banking has enough depth — regulation, trust, the sheer complexity of actually moving money — that Mercury can afford to embrace AI across the board.
Catch the full conversation on this week’s episode of ACCESS, the podcast I co-host with Ellis Hamburger:
Mercury has reached $650 million in annualized revenue with more than 300,000 customers. It recently applied for a national bank charter after reaching a $3.5 billion valuation. Immad is also one of the more prolific angel investors in tech, with more than 350 investments including Substack, Rippling, Airtable, and Deel. We discuss his thoughts on investing and new startups, and also got into why poker has become the unofficial networking sport of tech.
Highlights from our conversation:
Mercury is building AI into the product and giving the data layer away at the same time. Immad acknowledged that there are times when talking to your data is the right interface, and times when you want to click around and see information presented visually. “There are geeky people like you who want to learn what MCP is and do it themselves,” he told me, “but other people just want to be able to pull that data directly into the AI directly in Mercury.”
Companies are whitewashing their layoffs with AI. Mercury is growing the team by 20-25% this year while also automating as much as possible. Immad called out Block’s recent layoffs specifically: “They weren’t growing very fast, and they were like, actually, we just don’t need 40% of people.” The real issue for many of these companies is that they overhired during the pandemic or just aren’t growing, and that AI is a convenient framing.
Mercury’s approach to marketing is unusual for a fintech. They delivered PB&J sandwiches around SF (the name came from an internal code name for Insights), gave away Casios and AeroPresses at South by Southwest tied to a “craft” theme, and commissioned generative art for each customer based on their transaction data for the Insights launch. Immad’s philosophy: “I’d rather do 10 things, and they’re all kind of fun and interesting, and maybe nine of them fall flat, but one of them is like a big viral hit.”
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