Move over, Robinhood – Chime is currently the most valuable U.S.-based buyer fintech.
According to CNBC, Chime, a so-called neobank that provides branchless banking services to clients, has become worth $14.5 billion, besting the price tag of substantial list trading platform Robinhood at about $11.2 billion, as of mid August, per PitchBook details. Business Insider also claimed about the possible new valuation earlier this week.
Chime locked in the new valuation of its via a collection F financial backing round to the tune of $485 million from investors like Coatue, ICONIQ, Tiger Global, Whale Rock Capital, General Atlantic, Access Technology Ventures, Dragoneer, and DST Global, a CNBC.
The fintech has noticed enormous development over its seven-year existence. Chime first arived at one million users in 2018, and also has since additional millions of buyers, though the business hasn’t believed the amount of customers it currently has in complete. Chime supplies banking services by way of a mobile app including no-fee accounts, debit cards, paycheck advancements, and no overdraft fees. Over the course of the pandemic, cost savings balances attained all-time highs, CEO Chris Britt told Fortune back in May.
Britt told CNBC the competitor savings account is going to be poised for an IPO in the following twelve months. And it is up in the atmosphere whether Chime will go the means of others before it and opt for a particular purpose acquisition company, or perhaps SPAC, to go public. “I most likely get calls from two SPACS a week to see in the event that we’re thinking about getting into the marketplaces quickly,” Britt told CNBC. “The reality is we’ve a number of initiatives we wish to finish over the next twelve months to place us in a position to be market-ready.”
The opposition bank’s fast growth hasn’t been without challenges, however. As Fortune reported, again in October of 2019 Chime put up with a multi day outage which left a lot of customers unable to access the money of theirs. Sticking to the outage, Britt told Fortune in December the fintech had increased capability as well as pressure testing of its infrastructure amid “heightened consciousness to carrying out them in a far more rigorous alternative given the speed as well as the size of growth that we have.”