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.

The hungry response from retail investors 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.

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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.

Chime co-founder Ryan King.Image Credits:Chime

So what happened to save Chime? A single seed investor said yes: Lauren Kolodny, then a partner at Aspect Ventures, today a co-founder of Acrew Capital. Kolodny led Chime’s $9 million extension.

“She really took a bet on Chris and I, and believed in our passion and zeal and sort of attitude,” he said. “It was the only term sheet we had at the time.” She remained such a big supporter that Chime invited her to the podium to ring the opening bell at Nasdaq.

That check brought Chime’s total raise to $21 million at the time. Britt and King would go on to raise about $2.65 billion as a private company, PitchBook estimates. A few years later it would be chased by renown VCs like Iconiq.

Meanwhile, Kolodny saved the company by buying in at 26 cents per share, according to the company’s disclosure of share prices of its private rounds. So however many billions Thursday’s valuation landed on, she clearly still wins. (Kolodny did not immediately respond to our request for comment.)

Yet, the icing on the cake for King came during the company’s road show, where it was pitching institutional investors to buy its IPO shares.

While being asked for ID by the security guard in a white-marbled building that looked like a set from the HBO show “Billions,” the guard saw Britt’s Chime card in his wallet.

“And the security guard says, ‘Oh, I see that Chime card.’ And he winks at us,” King said. The founders asked if he was a Chime customer and the guard replied, “Checking and savings, baby!” and gave the founders a high five.

Chime almost died in 2016, turned down by 100 VCs — today it IPO’d at $14.5B