Chime

Overview

Chime is a banking app that says it is definitely not a bank. Its own positioning — “a financial technology company, not a bank” — is the legal and commercial core of the business: Chime provides the app and the brand while partner banks hold the deposits, and it earns its money the old-fashioned fintech way, from interchange fees collected every time a customer swipes a debit card (Reuters, Entrepreneur). Founded in 2012 by Chris Britt and Ryan King, it targets the roughly 200 million Americans earning $100,000 or less a year with no-fee accounts, early direct-deposit access, and a mobile-first experience (Reuters).

A hundred no’s

Chime’s founding story is a rejection epic. “We founded the company in 2012, and the first, really, five or six years was very difficult,” co-founder and original CTO Ryan King told TechCrunch. In early 2016, trying to raise an extension to the Series A, “we pitched 100 investors, maybe more, and got 100 no’s” — the company was, in King’s word, broke (Entrepreneur). The lifeline came from a single seed investor willing to take a bet: Lauren Kolodny, now a co-founder of Acrew Capital, who stood on the podium ringing the Nasdaq opening bell on IPO day nearly a decade later (Entrepreneur).

What the 100 rejections missed was the account-primary strategy. Two-thirds of Chime’s customers now use it as their direct-deposit and primary account relationship, Britt told CNBC — people tend to switch only at life-change moments, and once they switch, they stay (Entrepreneur). Revenue followed: $1.3 billion in 2023, $1.7 billion in 2024, and profitability in the first quarter of 2025, per its SEC filing (Entrepreneur).

The $25 billion haircut — then the pop

Chime’s last private round, in August 2021, valued it at $25 billion after raising $750 million; in total it took $2.65 billion from private investors, including Yuri Milner’s DST Global, General Atlantic, and ICONIQ (Reuters). By the time it filed to go public, the fintech valuation climate had cooled dramatically — the IPO priced at $27 a share, targeting roughly half the 2021 valuation.

The market disagreed with the discount. On June 12, 2025, Chime’s shares opened at $43 and surged 59% in their Nasdaq debut under the ticker CHYM, valuing the company at $18.4 billion; the company and selling investors placed 32 million shares to raise $864 million, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan leading the offering (Reuters). Analysts called it a potential bellwether for the long-delayed fintech IPO queue — Klarna, Gemini, Cerebras — waiting behind it (Reuters).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not name Chime’s partner banks or detail the 2021 California settlement over its use of the word “bank” — neither was verified from a fully-read source in this pass. The founding year is given as 2012 per co-founder King’s account; some sources say 2013. Revenue and profitability figures are per the company’s SEC filing as reported by Entrepreneur, not independently audited here. The profile does not predict whether the IPO pop sustained or how later quarters performed.