Mercury's CEO formalizes bets on early-stage founders with a $26M fund
Mercury co-founder and CEO Immad Akhund today announced the launch of a $26 million fund to back early-stage startups, a move that formalizes his extensive history of angel investing. Axios first reported in February.
Akhund has been an active angel investor since 2016, backing over 350 startups at their earliest stages. His portfolio includes companies such as Airtable, Applied Intuition, Decagon, Gecko Robotics, Linear and Substack, among others.
'I love supporting entrepreneurs – whether it's through building Mercury or investing. It gives me energy, perspective, and deep satisfaction to help ambitious founders build the future. A dedicated fund allows me to go deeper and back founders more meaningfully,' he tweeted today, also adding that he's still 100% focused on Mercury.
By launching a fund, the chief executive of one of the most widely used business banking platforms globally hopes to provide more structured support to founders while operationalizing his investment process. This includes bringing on Yash Doshi as a partner, an early investor in Mercury who has collaborated with Akhund on investments for some time.
The fund will focus on founders with a 'proven track record of building impactful products,' target opportunities in markets valued at $10 billion or more, and back startups pursuing solutions 'advancing humanity,' says the ex-part-time partner at Y Combinator.
This March, Mercury raised $300 million in primary and secondary funding at a $3.5 billion post-money valuation, double its valuation from the last time it raised capital in 2021. Sequoia, Coatue, CRV, Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital and Marathon were investors in that round.
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