A dozen years after its launch, fintech company Chime rang the bell this morning at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square to celebrate its initial public offering.
One of the most anticipated IPOs of the year, Chime is seemingly already basking in listing-day glory. After announcing that shares would hit the exchanges at a price of $27, investors were champing at the bit, and shares opened much higher, at around $43. That gave the company a valuation of around $18.4 billion.
“I never imagined when Chris [Britt, Chime’s other cofounder and current CEO] and I met that we’d be standing here today,” Chime cofounder Ryan King tells Fast Company.
Even if Chime does manage to reach that lofty $17 billion valuation, that is still a far cry from the $25 billion valuation it lassoed in 2021. Notably, another fintech company, eToro Group, also recently went public and has seen shares grow by 18% in the weeks since. Circle Internet Group, a stablecoin issuer, experienced a similar post-IPO boost in recent weeks.
While we don’t know where Chime’s stock is headed, the company’s leadership is happy to mark the milestone. “It’s a special moment, and I’m feeling a lot of gratitude,” King says. “I figured it’d be fun, we’d learn some stuff, and build something new. But odds were, it wouldn’t work out. That was the extent of it.”
But after building the company into one of the biggest fintechs on the market over the last 12 years, King says it’s a culmination of everything he and Britt have worked toward. Chime offers online banking products and services, many of which don’t add on additional fees or charges that may be associated with the same services at traditional banks. It has roughly 8.6 million members, and during 2014, it generated $1.7 billion in revenue, a 31% increase over 2023.
King says that the IPO timing was right for the company, despite volatility in the markets and political space. “We have been preparing for this moment for a while. We’re not trying to time the market,” he says. “We felt like the time was right.”
As for what’s ahead, King says there’s still more work to do. “Two-thirds of the country are not well served by the big, traditional banks, and we feel like we’ve created a better model,” he says.
“We’re just getting started. There’s a lot more [work] in front of us than behind us.”
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