Every few years, a new layer of business infrastructure gets rebuilt from scratch.

Stripe replaced legacy payment processors. Gusto replaced bloated payroll software. Deel replaced convoluted global hiring.

With every advance, the best solution wins, not just because it is less expensive, but because it is designed for the way companies actually work today, by people who have lived the problem firsthand.

We believe Mercury is doing that to business banking.

Today, we're proud to announce that USVC has invested $5 million in Mercury's Series D.

The year is 2013, and Immad Akhund is fighting the battle many founders quietly lose time to: their bank.

Heyzap, his mobile advertising startup, was growing fast. And yet every month, the same ritual to pay and receive his bills. Someone logging into a clunky portal each morning to manually check what had come in. PDF forms scattered across email inboxes that looked like they were designed in 1997. All of that and he still couldn't tell where his money was.

It felt like everyone around him was moving at startup speed, while his bank was moving at bank speed.

When Heyzap raised its first million-dollar round, the bank flagged the account. An incoming wire transfer from a reputable venture firm was, apparently, suspicious activity worth investigating.

Something had to give.

Immad eventually sold Heyzap in 2016 for $45 million and started writing angel checks into promising startups. Again, he heard the same story from almost every company he backed: banking was broken for ambitious entrepreneurs.

Instead of waiting for someone else to fix it, Immad decided to build the thing that should have already existed.

He spent the next year mapping out exactly what it would take to build a bank designed around how startups actually work. In 2017, he co-founded Mercury with Jason Zhang and Max Tagher.

The original product was simple in concept yet challenging in execution: a business account built for the way founders actually work. It had to be fast to open, with real-time visibility into every dollar, and as little friction as possible standing between a founder and their money. One day, they thought, it might even become the complete financial operating system for high-growth companies: checking, savings, corporate cards, bill pay, invoicing, expense management, treasury management, payroll, benefits, and HR compliance all in one place.

Today, one in three U.S. startups bank* with Mercury. Eight years in, we believe their ambition is closer to complete than anyone expected.

In March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. It was the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history. Overnight, tens of thousands of companies needed a new place to put their money, and they needed it immediately.

Mercury absorbed $2 billion in new deposits in five days.

That moment proved something no pitch deck ever could. Founders didn't choose Mercury because they had no other options. Plenty of banks were accepting deposits that week. They chose Mercury because it was the product they had wanted all along, and the crisis finally gave them the push to switch.

Today, Mercury is announcing a $200 million Series D at a $5.2 billion valuation, led by TCV, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Sequoia Capital, Spark Capital, CRV, and Sapphire Ventures. USVC is investing alongside them, bringing access to every U.S. investor, starting at $500.

The fundamentals behind Mercury’s fundraise are just as impressive as their genesis:

• $650M+ in annualized revenue as of Q3 2025
• 300,000+ customers, including one in three U.S. startups
• Four consecutive years of GAAP profitability on both net income and EBITDA
• 2.5x growth in new applications in Q1 2026 compared to Q1 2025

The profitability line is the one worth pausing on. Many fintech companies at Mercury's scale and growth rate are still burning cash, betting that the unit economics will work eventually. According to Mercury, they have delivered four straight years of GAAP profit through interest rate cycles, competitive pressure, and an industry crisis.

And the customer base has grown in ways few anticipated. In 2025, 73% of new Mercury customers came from outside the AI and tech startup category. E-commerce businesses and professional services firms, largest among them, are using Mercury for their company and their personal finances. Mercury was built for startups, but it turns out it works for anyone building something.

Then there's the recent news on a banking charter.

On April 27, 2026, Mercury received conditional approval from the OCC to establish Mercury Bank, N.A. as a federally chartered national bank. Final FDIC and Federal Reserve approvals are still pending, and neither the timing nor the outcome is guaranteed.

Today, Mercury earns interest on customer deposits by routing them through partner banks and sharing a cut of that revenue with those partners. A national bank charter would permit Mercury to hold the deposits directly with the potential for wider margins. It also unlocks Zelle, a lending business Mercury can't fully operate today, and payment infrastructure Mercury could own and control outright.

The Mercury that exists today is a strong, profitable business. Mercury once it has a fully approved charter is structurally different.

USVC's investment thesis starts with founders. We believe that, early on, the best businesses are often indistinguishable from mediocre ones on paper. What separates them, in our view, is who is building, and whether that person understands the problem deeply enough to keep solving it long after the initial insight has stopped feeling exciting.

Immad has been building Mercury for eight years. He lived the problem at Heyzap. He watched it at every company he backed as an angel.

He didn't just start Mercury because he saw a market opportunity. He started it because he had run out of patience waiting for someone else to fix something he knew could be better. That kind of founder typically doesn't stop when it gets hard.

The business’s health gave us three more reasons to invest.

Profitability changes what you're underwriting. Most growth-stage fintech investments ask you to believe the unit economics will eventually work. That’s not the case with Mercury. Four consecutive years of GAAP profitability shifts the investment question entirely to how large it can become.

The charter could become a structural advantage. To be clear, we're not investing purely on the assumption the banking charter gets approved. The business Mercury runs today is strong enough to justify the investment on its own. But if the charter is fully approved, Mercury's cost structure will change in a material way: direct deposit custody, eliminated revenue sharing, expanded margins, and product capabilities that Mercury can't fully offer today. It's a meaningful second act for an already great business.

The market arrived larger than anyone modeled. Mercury set out to bank startups. In 2025, nearly three out of four new customers came from outside that category. Mercury didn't change to capture them. The product was simply good enough that it worked for customers it was never specifically designed for. And that market is about to get bigger: AI is collapsing the time between having an idea and starting a company. New U.S. business applications rose 18% in Q1 2026 year over year. Mercury is well positioned for the largest wave of new business creation in a generation.

USVC participated in Mercury's Series D with a $5 million investment.

The investment structure is worth understanding clearly.

This is a direct position on Mercury's cap table with no underlying management fees, no carried interest. When Mercury creates value through this investment, it flows to USVC without another layer of costs in between.

To be precise about what you own: you do not hold Mercury shares directly. You own USVC shares, a regulated fund that holds Mercury as one investment alongside private companies and emerging managers. What that gives you is economic exposure in our portfolio to a profitable, high-growth company with a national bank charter pending.

The people who have historically gotten into a round like this are endowments, family offices, and large venture funds writing eight-figure checks. Individual investors, even accredited ones, almost never access a primary position in a company at Mercury's stage. By the time a business this well-built reaches the public markets, the appreciation that happened while it was still private is already behind you.

That's the access USVC exists to provide.

U.S. investors can get started with as little as $500. No accreditation required.

Learn more: usvc.com

*Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC. Market share calculation based on US-based companies that received an angel, pre-seed, seed, or Series A investment reported on Crunchbase in the most recent year.

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Information regarding Mercury, including operating metrics and business developments, is based on information provided by Mercury or other third-party sources believed reliable, has not been independently verified by USVC, is presented as of the dates indicated, and may have changed. Mercury operating metrics are historical company-level metrics and are not performance of USVC, are not indicative of USVC’s future returns, and should not be relied upon as guarantees of future results. Mercury has received conditional approval from the U.S. Treasury to establish Mercury Bank, N.A., but final FDIC and Federal Reserve approvals remain pending, and there can be no assurance that final approvals will be obtained, that approvals will be obtained on expected terms or timing, or that the anticipated business, margin, product, or strategic benefits of a bank charter will be realized. Mercury is one investment in USVC’s portfolio, and USVC shareholders do not own Mercury shares directly. The value of an investment in USVC will depend on the performance of the Fund’s overall portfolio and not on Mercury alone. Investments in private companies, including Mercury, may be difficult to value, may not have readily available market prices, and may be subject to fair value determinations that could prove inaccurate.

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