One of the year’s most anticipated IPOs took place on Thursday when neobank Chime raised $864 million in its IPO, pricing its shares at $27, which is above its previously announced range of $24 to $26. That gave it a starting market cap of about $9.8 billion.
While some would point out that this is far below its last private valuation of $25 billion, according to PitchBook’s estimates, shares opened at $42, putting it at $14.5 by midday in heavy trading, according to Yahoo Finance. It closed the day at $37 and about a $12 billion market cap. That’s still well shy of it’s yesteryear high, but it was a healthy response from retail investors all the same.
The hungry response is largely due to some impressive financials. Chime reported $1.3 billion in revenue in 2023 and $1.7 billion in 2024. Losses shrank from $203 million in 2023 to $25 million in 2024. It became profitable in its first quarter of 2025 with $13 million of net income on $519 million in revenue — although the company warns it may not stay in the black as it spends on growth.
Still, no founder journey is always up and to the right, and that has been especially true for Chime. The company had its share of struggles, like layoffs in 2022 and a fight with regulators in 2021 that forbade it from calling itself a “bank.”
But the biggest struggle of them all was when it almost died before it even raised a Series B.
“We founded the company in 2012, and the first, really, five or six years was very difficult in terms of convincing investors to invest in the idea and the business. It was just way, way harder than I expected,” co-founder Ryan King and the company’s original CTO told TechCrunch (he’s currently a board member and a principal shareholder).
“In the beginning of 2016, specifically, we were trying to raise an extension to our Series A and we pitched 100 investors, maybe more, and got 100 no’s,” he said.
Chime was almost out of money at that point, he said. He and co-founder and CEO Chris Britt still believed in the mission: an online bank experience, aimed at the working class, that was free for users, making its money on interchange fees. Chime, for instance, doesn’t charge overdraft fees, and it offers credit-building tools like cash-secured “credit cards.”
But VC after VC looked at the heavily regulated industry it was trying to disrupt, and its admittedly meager growth by that time, and passed.
King remembers reading a tech press article about how the founders of Robinhood pitched 50 to 75 investors, and only got a couple of term sheets, scoffing to himself, “I get 50 no’s in a week,” he said, smiling about it now.
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