Move over, Robinhood – Chime is currently the best U.S. based consumer fintech.
Based on CNBC, Chime, a so-called neobank offering branchless banking services to buyers, is now worth $14.5 billion, besting the asking price of significant retail trading platform Robinhood at about $11.2 billion, as of mid August, a PitchBook details. Business Insider also said about the possible new valuation earlier this week.
Chime locked in the brand new valuation of its through a series F financial backing round to the tune of $485 million from investors such as Coatue, ICONIQ, Tiger Global, Whale Rock Capital, General Atlantic, Access Technology Ventures, Dragoneer, and DST Global, a CNBC.
The fintech has viewed massive development over its seven-year existence. Chime primary come to one million drivers in 2018, and has since additional large numbers of purchasers, nonetheless, the business hasn’t said how many customers it currently has in total. Chime supplies banking products by way of a mobile app including no fee accounts, debit cards, paycheck advancements, and absolutely no overdraft fees. Over the study course of the pandemic, savings balances reached all-time highs, CEO Chris Britt told Fortune returned in May.
Britt told CNBC the competitor bank account will be poised for an IPO in the following twelve weeks. And it’s up in the atmosphere whether Chime will go the means of others before it and get a particular goal acquisition company, or perhaps SPAC, to go public. “I possibly get phone calls coming from 2 SPACS a week to determine if we are interested in getting into the market segments quickly,” Britt told CNBC. “The truth is we’ve a number of initiatives we wish to complete with the following twelve months to set us in a spot to be market-ready.”
The opposition bank’s fast progress hasn’t been with no challenges, however. As Fortune noted, again in October of 2019 Chime put up with a multi day outage which left a lot of customers not able to access their cash. Sticking to the outage, Britt told Fortune in December the fintech had increased capability and worry tests of the infrastructure of its amid “heightened consciousness to carrying out them in an even more intense way given the speed as well as the size of development that we have.”