VC Tech World was Abuzz on Thursday when Neobank Chime successfully became a public company. Chime raised $864 million with a $27 share price.
This wasn’t the biggest IPO of the year. CoreWeave, for example, raised $1.5 billion in March, and its market capitalization on the first day reached around $14 billion. (Its stock price and valuation have skyrocketed since then).
However, Chime’s cap table includes the absolute Who’s Who of Silicon Valley investors.
This includes Yoonkee Sull from Iconiq. He and his venture investment partner Greg Stanger spent two years looking at the chimes before writing a check, Sull told TechCrunch.
Of course, Iconiq is well known in the Valley as the family office of some of the industry’s most famous billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg. With $80 billion in assets under management, he invests in everything from stocks to real estate and also has a venture capital arm. Its portfolio includes benching, camber, databig, green, concepts, and lamps. If you’ve heard of the company, Iconiq is probably interested.
Sull said he and Stanger first met Chime co-founders Chris Britt and Ryan King in 2017. Iconiq’s VCs tend to prefer outbound trading with the founders of vetted rather than inbound pitch and US sessions.
Still, calling Iconiq just a year after Britt and King’s Humbling 2016 turned out to be a very conversion was a very conversion. Chime had run out of cash in 2016. King desperately refused to raise over 100 VCS, he told TechCrunch. Today, Aspect Ventures partner Lauren Korodney, co-founder of Aswal Capital, saved the company with a $9 million Series A extension round.
Sull said the 2017 casual meeting was “an early day at that point, but I think what they wanted to achieve and do was clear,” Sull said of the founders. Chimes holds positions as the average person and working class banking and credit building resource. This is the opposite of Iconiq’s bread and butter wealth management business.
When VCS saw its founders “opposed what they said they would do,” Sull was convinced that Iconiq was elbowed in 2019 to Chime’s over-dollar Series D.
“When I invested in 2019, there were literally dozens of other competitors who were following similar papers and ideas,” Sall said. Iconiq chose a chime and took part in the follow-in round. Because investors thought the founders were more concentrated and they weren’t distracted by “shiny new objects.”
In subsequent rounds, Series E investors paid around $41 and Series F paid at $60 per share, Chime revealed. So, even with solid IPOs, not all private stocks are still above water.
Sull did not comment on how much Iconiq paid for its investment, but this is not so big enough to be made public. However, he said Iconiq did not want to settle it.
“We have stocks and sell them at IPOs,” he said. Existing shareholders, including employees, are currently subject to a 180-day lockup period.
Iconiq is one of many Chime supporters who have won winning laps on Chime’s graduation and earned chime laps to become a public company. Menlo Ventures investor Shawn Carolan wrote in a Menlo Ventures blog post:
He then led Chime’s $15 million Series B in 2017 and was willing to sell 3.75 million shares at an IPO of 15.3 million shares. The Series B stock was priced at 47 cents, Chime revealed.
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