“I do find this kind of pretty funny that everyone calls all their revenue ARR now. I grew up in the day where it's no ARR unless it's contracted revenue for like three years. I think that's all thrown away now. So I always say annualized revenue. It's nice and precise.”
Newcomer Pod · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Asked how recurring Mercury's revenue really is, Akhund explains that it comes from deposits and payment volume, and grows as customer businesses grow. He then mocks the current habit of calling any revenue "ARR", annual recurring revenue.
Transcript
…I think one thing before I started Mercury, AI I was like very curious about is like, you know, obviously because we serve small businesses, many of them fail. And that's actually our main churn. Like a main churn is people start a business and then they don't. See, this is what we need agents
for. It's like, oh man, you're destroying your business. It's going to die if you keep doing this. What's the gave you? I guess nobody wants a bank that's so prescriptive. I mean, we
really do want to help people succeed, but also that's part of being a business, right? You take a risk and you want to start something and maybe it doesn't work out, right? Like I don't, I think like zero, 100% success would actually mean that we're not doing, we're not experimenting as like humanity. But so I wanted to say like, you know, every cohort, like every month, we get a new set of businesses and we kind of look at like, how do they grow over time, right? Which kind of ties to your question of like, you know, is this recurring? And we've generally found like every set of businesses fail, right? Whatever 20% or so fail within a year. But the ones that succeed kind of tend to scale both spend and deposits with us over time. So yeah, every month actually, every month becomes like an additive thing over time, which is, I guess, goes back to kind of, is this recurring or not? I do find this kind of pretty funny that everyone calls all their revenue ARR now. And like, you know, I grew up in the day where like, it's no ARR unless it's like…
The credit card business, like how key is that? I mean, obviously, I don't know, RAMP is a juggernaut, has a huge valuation. I think, was it today valued at like $60 billion? You see RAMP as a direct competitor? How core is that to your business?
Yeah, we launched corporate credit cards kind of end of 2022. It's been growing really nicely. And most of our customers use the Mercury corporate card. Most of the time, we're not competing against RAMP. When we first started, we were really competing against SVB. That was our main competitor.…
to acquire the customer at the banking stage. And then, yeah,
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