Origin Story
Pakistan to Cambridge to San Francisco, Via YC - Twice
He was nine years old when his family left Pakistan for the UK. The reason was straightforward - better education, better opportunity. He landed at Clare College, Cambridge, one of the oldest colleges in the world, and studied computer science. He graduated in 2006 with an MA. Then Bloomberg, then entrepreneurship, then everything else.
What Y Combinator gave him wasn't just money or a network. It gave him a city. He moved to San Francisco in 2007 for Clickpass, an OpenID single-sign-on service in YC S07. Clickpass was acquired by Yola in 2008. He kept the city.
True Story
In 2007, a Pakistani-British kid flew to San Francisco for a batch of Y Combinator. His product was Clickpass - a single sign-on tool. It got acquired within a year. He didn't go home. He started another company.
Heyzap came next - YC W09 - co-founded with Jude Gomila. Mobile gaming tools, mobile advertising. For nearly a decade he built it, grew it, and in 2016 sold it to Fyber (RNTS Media) for $45 million. By then the idea for Mercury had already been forming. He'd been frustrated with banking the entire time he ran Heyzap. Every stupid wire transfer. Every time his startup was treated like a credit risk rather than a customer.
The Gap Year That Wasn't
In 2017, between exiting Heyzap and launching Mercury, he spent six months as a part-time partner at Y Combinator doing the Winter 2017 batch. Office hours with founders. He's said this was formative - not just giving advice but learning what the next generation of founders actually needed. He filed that away.
He co-founded Mercury in 2017. He did not launch immediately. He spent 18 months building, testing, talking to founders, getting the product right. Ignoring the "move fast and iterate in public" orthodoxy. When Mercury launched in April 2019, it was ready.
You can't take other people's lessons and make them your own. The answer is to understand the framework, understand what was the specific situation.
- Immad Akhund, on ignoring conventional startup advice
The Weekend That Changed Everything
On March 10, 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. The startup ecosystem was in genuine panic. Billions in deposits at risk. Founders watching in real time as their operating accounts became inaccessible.
Immad and his team shipped Mercury Vault - a feature extending FDIC insurance from $1 million to $5 million per account via sweep networks - between Saturday and Monday. One weekend. While running the company, while fielding thousands of inbound inquiries, while the industry was in crisis mode.
Mercury gained 17,000 new customers in the four months following SVB's collapse. Revenue grew 4x year-over-year from May 2022 to May 2023. "The craziest time was the first five days," he said later. He spent those days on constant calls, responding to DMs - personally - from founders who needed to know where to put their money.
That's product-market fit demonstrated in real time, under pressure, at scale.
