Most fintechs spend a decade trying to capture banking-like economics without becoming a bank. Mercury just did the opposite.

The headline last Wednesday was the money. Mercury closed a $200M Series D at a $5.2 billion valuation, led by TCV, with Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Sequoia, Sapphire, Spark, and CRV all participating. That’s up 49% from a $3.5B valuation just 14 months ago. CEO Immad Akhund told CNBC the company is at $650M annualized revenue with four years of profitability. Total funding to date sits at roughly $700M across primary and secondary.

The number that actually matters is buried lower in the announcement. Mercury submitted an application to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national bank charter, and applied for federal deposit insurance with the FDIC. The company has stated plans to file with the Federal Reserve to restructure as a bank holding company.

For context, this is the hardest path in fintech. Estimated timeline is 12 to 24 months. Capital requirements are steep. Operating constraints are real. Very few fintechs in the modern era have made it through.

So why do it?

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Vapi is a San Francisco-based voice AI platform that enables enterprises to build, deploy, and manage configurable voice agents at scale. The company raised a $50 million Series B on May 12, 2026, led by Peak XV, with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing total funding to $72 million. The round valued the company at approximately $500 million.

Co-founders Jordan Dearsley and Nikhil Gupta met at the University of Waterloo and previously built a Y Combinator-backed calendar app that reached profitability. Dearsley started Vapi almost by accident. In mid-2023, he built a voice-based AI therapist for his daily walks, chaining models together and optimizing for latency until he had a working phone-based system. The therapy product didn’t take off, but the infrastructure did. Vapi launched publicly on Product Hunt in March 2024.

The team is small but battle-tested. The startup currently has around 100 employees. But here’s what matters: the company reports more than 1 million developers, over 2.7 million unique agents created, and over 1 billion calls made. That’s not hype. That’s proof of product-market fit.

The Market: Why Voice AI Is Becoming Non-Negotiable

The enterprise voice AI market is moving from “nice to have” to “competitive necessity” in real time.

The global enterprise voice AI agents market was valued at $6.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 29.5% from 2026 to 2034, reaching an estimated $62.4 billion by 2034. That’s a 9x market expansion over eight years. But there’s a more immediate signal: the market crossed $22 billion in 2026, enterprise adoption tripled, and Gartner says contact centers will save $80 billion this year from conversational AI alone.

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SECTION 1: Company Overview

Adfin is a London-based fintech built to solve a deceptively simple problem: getting small businesses paid on time. But the approach is anything but simple.

The company pairs proprietary payment infrastructure with what it calls “agentic AI workflows”—autonomous agents that decide the best course of action to recover, reconcile, and accelerate invoice payments. Translation: an AI system that acts on behalf of your finance team, deciding which payment method to present, when to retry failed payments, how to sequence reminders, and when to escalate without human judgment bottlenecks.

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Company Overview

Standard Intelligence is a six-person AI research company headquartered in San Francisco. It closed a $75 million Series A on April 30, 2026, led by Sequoia Capital and Spark Capital, at a pre-money valuation of approximately $425 million. The post-money figure lands near $500 million. That math gives you a company worth half a billion dollars before it has publicly shipped a product, staffed a sales team, or hired its tenth employee.

The investors behind the round are not tourists. Sonya Huang and Mikowai Ashwill represented Sequoia. Yasmin Razavi led for Spark Capital. Angel investors include Andrej Karpathy, the AI researcher who co-founded OpenAI and ran Tesla’s Autopilot program; Stanley Druckenmiller, one of the most respected macro investors alive; and Milan Kovac, former head of Autopilot software at Tesla.

The founding team is Galen Mead (21) and Devansh Pandey (20). They met as teenagers through the Atlas Fellowship, a selective program for high-school students focused on AI alignment. Both concluded, independently and then together, that AGI was arriving faster than institutions understood. Both left their undergraduate programs to act on that conclusion. Mead had been enrolled at the University of Toronto. Sequoia’s written description of them is unusually pointed: “taste, scrappiness, technical courage, and ambition” in a combination the firm found rare enough to write a very large check.

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