Mercury CEO Launches $26M Fund for Early-Stage Startups

Mercury CEO Launches $26M Venture Fund

Immad Akhund, CEO and co-founder of fintech company Mercury, has launched a $26 million fund dedicated to investing in early-stage startups. This move formalizes Akhund's extensive experience as an active angel investor since 2016.

Akhund has previously backed over 350 startups, including notable companies like Airtable, Applied Intuition, Decagon, Gecko Robotics, Linear, and Substack. He stated his commitment to supporting entrepreneurs both through Mercury and his personal investments.

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.

Yash Doshi, an early Mercury investor and long-time collaborator with Akhund, joins the fund as a partner. The fund will prioritize founders with proven track records of building impactful products in markets with a potential value of $10 billion or more. Akhund, a former part-time partner at Y Combinator, emphasizes a focus on startups developing solutions that "advance humanity."

This announcement follows Mercury's recent $300 million funding round in March 2025, which doubled the company's valuation to $3.5 billion. The round included investments from prominent firms like Sequoia, Coatue, CRV, Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, and Marathon.

The new fund allows Akhund to provide more structured support to founders and operationalize his investment process while remaining fully focused on Mercury's continued growth.